What to Do if Suppliers are Listed Twice in QuickBooks with Similar Names

Question: I have a supplier listed twice in QuickBooks with similar names. How do I fix that?

Answer: It’s not uncommon to end up with one supplier listed twice in QuickBooks—each time set up a little differently. For instance, you might have BIC Graphic and BIC Graphic NA and/or just BIC. This happens if multiple people in your organization set up a supplier, unaware that it already exists in QuickBooks. It can also occur if you are integrating another system with QuickBooks, such as SAGE Online, where the supplier name in their database might vary, however slightly, from what you have set up in QuickBooks. QuickBooks cannot recognize that these names are all meant to be the same supplier.

QuickBooks will not allow the same name to be in a list more than once. Using this information, we will use the merge function in QuickBooks to combine the names and the history for the various names that are all meant to be BIC Graphic NA.

First, decide which name you ultimately want all the variations to be. If you are integrating with another system, see what is in that system and choose that since that will come over repeatedly into your QuickBooks. Write down the name you have chosen to keep exactly as it is entered.

Go into Vendors  --> Vendor Center. Left click once on the name you want to change. This will highlight this name.

Right click once on this highlighted name --> Edit Vendor

Change the Vendor Name at the top of the screen to match the name you want to keep.

For instance, SAGE Online has BIC Graphic NA in their database. I will choose this to keep since that name will appear every time I import a BIC order from SAGE.

Click “OK.”

You will get a message that says:

“This name is already being used. Would you like to merge them?” This will merge not only the name, but the order history for BIC Graphic into BIC Graphic NA. Click “Yes.”

Make sure you are only merging varying names of the same company. Once you merge names, you cannot unmerge them.

This merging technique will also work for Customers and Items.