The Merge Entitites/Contacts Action can be used to:
Merge two customers
Merge two vendors
Merge two employees
Merge two other names
Merge two contacts
Swap contact types. This is useful if you wish to change the Main Contact of an entity in QuickBooks.
NOTE: This action is used only for those using QuickBooks on Desktop. There is a separate article for those who are using QuickBooks Online.
There are three choices which will be covered below:
Merge Entity
Merge Contact
Swap Contact Type
NOTE: You must be in single-user mode in order to merge entities in QuickBooks Desktop. Otherwise, you will get a sync-conflict until single-user mode is enabled.
Merge Entity
This will merge two Entity records together, for example, two customer records. You will need to provide the Record ID of the entities from the Entity table in order to merge them.
As indicated in the action itself:
Merge cannot be undone.
All records and details across all apps related with 'From Entity' will be moved to 'To Entity'.
Accounting data will be synced to QuickBooks automatically.
'From Entity' will be deleted from Method and QuickBooks.
You cannot merge two entities of different types. So only a customer can be merged to another customer. You cannot merge a customer to a vendor.
Merge Contact
This will merge two Contact records together in the Contacts table. You will need to provide the Record ID of the contacts in order to merge them.
As indicated in the action itself:
Merge cannot be undone.
Contacts must be of the same entity.
All records and details across all apps related with 'From Contact' will be moved to 'To Contact'.
'From Contact' will be deleted from Method.
A contact that is the Main Contact cannot be the 'From Contact'. If you wish to merge a Main Contact into another, you must first swap the contact type of the Main Contact.
Normally, contacts are not synced with QuickBooks, however, the Main Contact is synced to QuicKBooks. Any merge done to the Main Contact will automatically sync it to QuickBooks.
Swap Contact Type
When a customer is created in QuickBooks Desktop, a contact is automatically created in QuickBooks and Method. This contact is the Main Contact and identified as so by its type.
It is the only contact that will sync with QuickBooks Desktop. All other contacts created in Method will not sync to QuickBooks.
In the case the main contact leaves, you may want to assign the Main Contact type to another contact, which this action will do.
This will only swap the type, so no associated records will be affected.
The new Main Contact will automatically sync to QuickBooks.