If you see an incorrect name on an invoice, most likely this is because you've got some old extra data in your customer record in QuickBooks. 

Novi AMS fundamentally treats companies and people as two different types of records. Companies have company names, and people have first & last names. In Novi AMS, you will not find a company record that has a first name, and you will not find a person's record that has a company name on the record itself.  Instead, Novi tracks family relationships using separate records that are related to each other. Breaking records out allows for much better reporting and a lot more functionality.

>> Learn more about the QuickBooks customer record vs the Novi AMS member record.

When Novi AMS creates a QuickBooks customer record, it will have a company name or a first and last name. However, if a record is created within QuickBooks, then there is nothing that Novi can do to stop a well-meaning bookkeeper from adding both company and first/last information. While this may be fine in the short term, having company and first/last name information on a single customer record in QuickBooks can wreak havoc on your transactions.

When QuickBooks creates an invoice, sales receipt, or other transaction, it uses all of the information it has to fill in the "Bill to" section. If a company record has a first and last name inside of QuickBooks, then you will see that first and last name applied to the invoice. The same is true of people records. If QuickBooks has data in the company name field, then you will see that company name listed on the invoice.

Since Novi relies on QuickBooks as the system of record for accounting, even transactions created within Novi follow these rules.

If your business workflow includes manually adding first/last name information to company records or company names to people records, we highly suggest that you discontinue the practice. This can quickly lead to additional data maintenance costs as people change companies.

Novi AMS has a number of different tools to track and change a person's parent company. We highly suggest that you not track this separately in QuickBooks unless it is by linking two records together.

It is quite possible that the reason you're reading this article is due to work that was done long ago in your QuickBooks file. Perhaps you noticed a strange name on a company's invoice or some old company name on a person's invoice. 

When we first connect Novi to QuickBooks, we run an algorithm to determine if your customer records are people or companies. However, we do not automatically delete your first/last name or company name data on the off chance that our algorithm is incorrect (it's correct more than 99% of the time, but there still can be a handful of outliers). We also don't want to get in the habit of changing - or deleting - your QuickBooks data without notifying you.

To get a sense of the scope of the problem, you can run a "Customer Contact List" report within QuickBooks. Note that this may be called the "Member Contact List" depending on your QuickBooks settings. When pulling the QuickBooks report, make sure to add Company Name, Last Name, and First Name to the report. This will allow you to quickly scan your customer list to find records that have extra data on them. Remember, this issue is on the QuickBooks side, so a Novi custom report will not be helpful. 

Don't forget to customize the report:

All of this means that you may have some manual work ahead of you. If you want to clean up your old QuickBooks data, you'll need to open up individual records inside of QuickBooks and manually delete the data from the fields that you're not using.

Steps for manual cleanup:

Do you have 5 extra minutes? Save yourself the trouble in the future and identify other records that may be doing the same thing. Find them quickly by using the QuickBooks Analyzer tool (located in your Association Settings).

Novi has a setting we can turn on for you that would automatically send a Billing Contact's name to QuickBooks Online and add it to the company's record/transactions. If this approach will work well for your member data, then you can avoid manually editing records in QuickBooks Online.
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​>> Learn more about the setting to automatically add Billing Contact names to Invoices and Sales Receipts for companies.

To enable this setting, reach out to the Novi support team via Intercom.