How to Make a Vendor a Customer in Quickbooks
It’s not uncommon for vendors to also be customers. While your business relationship with a vendor may start off as just that — them providing a service for your business — they may decide to try out your product for themselves. In this case, you’ll need to set up the vendor as a customer, which we’re going to explain in greater detail in today’s blog post.
There are a few different ways to manage vendors who are also customers, the easiest being to give them two separate names. For instance, place a C or V in front of the name to indicate whether it’s the vendor’s account of customer’s account (e.g. C John or V John). There’s no rule — written or otherwise — stating that you must follow this naming format, but it will almost certainly prove beneficial in helping you remember which account is the vendor and which account is the customer.
You aren’t out of the woods just yet. Unless you want your checks printed with the vendor’s “unusual” name, such as V John, you’ll need to set up your account so it prints them as just John. Quickbooks allows you to specify the exact format that you wish to use for your checks, meaning you can create them to any name, regardless of the name being used within your account. The bottom line is that you want to make sure all new checks are created with the vendor’s actual name and not the nickname used to differentiate the vendor and customer accounts.
An alternative solution is to merge the two accounts into one. Keep in mind that merging is not reversible, so make sure it’s something you want to accomplish before proceeding. To merge a vendor and customer’s account into one, click the Gear icon > Chart of Accounts > and click the name that you wish to keep and select Edit. Next, copy the name, go back to the Chart of Accounts, and click the Edit button next to the name that you wish to remove. From here, paste the copied name into the name field and double-check the information to ensure it’s correct. When you are finished, click Save followed by Yes to confirm the merge.
Did this tutorial work for you? Let us know in the comments section below!