Merging Customer Records
Suppose you remodeled buildings for two companies run by brothers: Morey's City Diner and Les' Exercise Studio. The brothers conclude that their businesses have a lot of synergy—people are either eating or trying to lose weight, and usually doing both. To smooth out their cash flow, they decide to merge their companies into More or Less Body Building and All Your Can Eat Buffet. You have to figure out how to create one customer from the two you have in QuickBooks and you also want to retain the jobs, invoices, and other transactions that you created when the companies were separate.
If you don't use a standard naming convention as recommended on page 55, you could end up with multiple customer records representing one real-life customer, such as Les' Exercise Studio and LesEx. You can merge these doppelgangers into one customer just as you can merge two truly separate companies into one.
Merging customers in QuickBooks results in one customer that retains the entire transaction history for the two original customers. You don't so much merge two customers as turn one customer's records into those of another's. If your customers have jobs associated with them, you have to move all the jobs to the customer you intend to keep before you start the merge. Subsume the customer with fewer jobs so you don't have to move as many jobs. If you don't use jobs, subsume whichever customer you want.
Merging customers in QuickBooks won't win any awards for best intuitive ...
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