Question

Customers and Vendors with same name

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
August 5, 2021
3 replies
64 views

I am — sadly — well aware of the “solution” for dealing with vendors and customers being the same person/entity. This is not a request for help in finding a solution.

Instead, it is an observation. From someone who is a highly-skilled programmer and database designer.

The fact this situation isn’t handled intuitively is a huge, dinosaur-killing-level blunder on the part of Quicken. Accounting is supposed to represent the real world. In the real world individual entities can fulfill many roles. Quicken attempts to be accounting software. Consequently, this “problem” should’ve been addressed in the earliest architectural discussions for the Quickbooks database.

It was not.

Shame on Quicken management for letting this flaw exist. But anyone can make a mistake.

The real nastiness is that Quicken management cares so little about their customers that they haven’t made fixing the problem a AAA don’t-go-home-until-it’s-fixed priority.

Which makes it abundantly clear Quicken does not care about their customers.

QuickBooks Online

AlexV

Level 10

Hello treasurer91!

Thanks for reaching out to us again. I understand that you need an option to add customers and vendors with the same name. Let me assist you with it.

QuickBooks Online won't allow us to add a customer, vendor, or employee using the same name. The reason behind this is to avoid confusion that may affect your entire accounting data. We always advise adding a special character or digit to fix this.

Also, I noticed that you mentioned Quicken in your post. I suggest you reach out to them to see if they have a resolution regarding the customers and vendors with the same name. Simply click this link: https://www.quicken.com/support.

Do you need help in running financial reports? Check this article: Run reports in QuickBooks Online. This includes links about customizing reports, memorizing, and other common reports.

Leave a comment below if you have other concerns. I'll be here!

T

treasurer91Author

I'm going to assume you're a human being, and not a bot, AlexV...so I will encourage you to >>read what I wrote<<, rather than provide a canned/boiler-plate answer.

The introductory paragraph to my message shows that your reply is completely off the mark and totally useless. I am well aware of exactly the "solution" you propose.

But it's not a solution! Or even a particularly good workaround.

It's a sign of lousy software/database architecture.

Please do not waste my and anyone else's time by continuing this conversation. If you really want to do something useful why don't you pass along to your management that they really, really, really need to change their database architecture so the "name collision problem" does not occur. Not by forcing customers to follow a dumb, ad hoc, prone-to-errors "solution". But by designing the database to recognize that, yes, one individual or entity can fill more than one role (i.e., be both a customer and a vendor).

Thank you, however, for asking me to clarify which software I am using. It's Quickbooks Online.

MichelleBh

Level 8

I'll take note of your feedback so we can improve the services and experience that we can offer to you, @treasurer91.

Your satisfaction means everything to us. So, I'll route you to a page where you can post feature suggestions. This way, our engineers can find a scheme about the customers and vendors with the same name.

Here's how:

In your QBO account, go to the Gear icon on the upper right side.
Click Feedback under Profile.
Type your suggestion in the box and tap Next.

Your valuable suggestion goes to our Product Development team to help enhance your experience in QuickBooks.

Additionally, I'd recommend visiting our blog site. That is where we share recent happenings and future developments, such as updates to newly added features.

Lastly, I've added an article that helps you import, delete, merge, and add sub-customers: Add and manage customers in QuickBooks Online.

I'm always here to work with you again if you have other questions about handling your customer information. I hope all is well.

B

BP505

I agree with this assessment completely. This was an original design flaw that has now been duplicated by other software suppliers in order to work with quick books.

No one uses Name as a unique identifier - You can't even post here without a unique identifier (Email, username, password). Imagine going into the post office or the DMV or the phone co. or anywhere and saying, "Hello my name is John Doe could you look up my account for me"? Just think about this for a minute. Do you think you would get your mail if just your name was on the envelope? How about your paycheck that is direct deposited in your account? would you get it if you told your employer just deposit it in the account "John Doe at Bank of America"? How many John Smiths or Jose Gonzales do you think there are?

C

CSEF

I agree with you that Intuit was WRONG WRONG WRONG to use the vendor's name (or customer's name) as the primary key in any database. However, there is a solution that is only a little bit bad.

When you have two vendors (or customers) with exactly the same name, all you need to do is change the DISPLAY NAME (not the name, not the vendor name, not the name to print on checks, but the display name) of the vendor (or customer). This will not change anything that the vendor (or customer) ever sees from you.

The "little bit bad" part is that you cannot just use the name when you want to generate a check (or invoice). Instead, you need keep track of the Display Name. In principle, this is no different from using an honest-to-goodness primary key which you'd have to keep track of in a well-designed database. It's just easy to forget when the field USUALLY has human-readable meaning.

Still, I agree that intuit violated the first rule taught in Database 101: primary keys have one and only one function, and should therefore never have any ordinary human-readable meaning attached to its value. If Intuit would change the field name "Display Name" to "Vendor Number," and made it an autoincrementing value instead of a usually-predictable name, we'd all be better off.

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