Quickbooks Online Tutorials: Merging Accounts

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The Issue

Two of the most common questions we are asked on Intuit Customer support forums and from our clients are

I set up a new account for this expense, but I already had one similar, do I have to move the transactions one by one?

or the more common

We already had Customer X but someone added them again as Customer XY, how do we correct the situation?

There is thankfully a very simple solution that will get you back on track in no time and save hours of recoding transactions.

Solution – Merging Accounts

There are different start points for each type of account:

Chart of Account Merging

This is where you may have allocated a transaction to a new account, let’s say “Postage”. Later you realise you already have an account called “Print, Postage and Stationery” and decide you’d rather collate the transactions under one heading.

You need to make sure that you know what each account is called before the next step.

  1. Go to the Chart of Accounts via the Transactions menu
  2. Click on the account that you want to stop using and click edit
  3. Under the name of the account change it to exactly the same as the ongoing account
  4. Click Save
  5. You will be asked whether you want to merge the accounts, say yes

The transactions from Postage will be moved to Print, Postage and Stationery and the Postage account will become inactive.

Customer Merging

This is where you have the same customer set up under different names, for example you may have Fred Bloggs set up but someone has added Mr F Bloggs.

Decide the customer name with the detail that you want to keep (e.g the correct address and phone numbers etc).  Make sure you have the name copied exactly.

  1. Go to customers tab
  2. Select the customer that you want to merge into the good customer record
  3. Change the “customer name” and “display as” to be the same as the customer that you want to keep
  4. Click save
  5. You will be asked if you want to merge customers, say yes

The transactions will now all be available in the customer you chose to keep and the edited customer will become inactive but contain no transactions.

Supplier/Vendor Merging

This is done in exactly the same way as merging Customers.

Conclusion and Other tips

So as you can see it is quite easy to correct the situation but how to prevent it from happening?

We find that one of the main reasons for this to occur is users not waiting for the selection boxes to populate when they are typing. For arguments sake when typing in Postage you would expect Print, Postage and Stationery to show up, if selected then the issue does not occur. The same for customers. Rather than using drop down search we recommend getting in the habit of typing and letting QBO offer suggestions.

Vendor duplicates are often created by Bill Automation software, it is possible in most to merge suppliers within the software, there is definitely a process in our chosen software Entryless which we will cover in a later tutorial.