Hi gjprince,

Thanks for stopping by to share your input on how you set up a customer that is also a supplier to differentiate the name slightly in QuickBooks Online. You're right, it's about finding a system that works for you, and I'm glad you've got a system for your books. I'd also like to further clarify how this can be done so that everyone can decide the best way to make the names different for them.

For things like drop-down menus and transaction sorting, QuickBooks Online uses the Display name as field on your customer or supplier setup. This is the field that you'll want to ensure is different in your books so that the program understands where to categorize your transactions and ensure that you don't accidentally assign the wrong one to the wrong name type. Don't worry, it's not the name your customers or suppliers would see on their copies of their forms.

As an example, you could put a name as John Doe (Customer) and then John Doe (Supplier) in the Display name as fields on their respective profiles to enter the same person as both a customer and a supplier. If you do this, I also recommend being mindful of the Print on cheque as field, which uses the Display name as field by default. You can simply uncheck the box if you don't want it to also display on a cheque in that way.

In doing this, you can use the first, last, and middle name fields and have the same name as many times as you'd like in your customer and supplier lists. So long as the name is different in the display field, you'll be good to go.

If you happen to be using QuickBooks Desktop, the program behaves in the same way in that it'll only allow you to use a name once. In this case, you can use the Customer name or Vendor name fields at the top of the Edit customer and Edit vendor windows to slightly change the names.

I hope this helps expand on the options available!