Sections In This Article
When Manual Payee Record Merging is Required
It is possible to create duplicate payee records in Relay when syncing bill payments with your accounting software, such as Xero or QuickBooks Online. This occurs if you first manually create a payee record in Relay and then later a contact record representing that same payee is also synced from Xero or QuickBooks Online.
If the duplicate payee records do not contain an email address, you will need to merge them by manually copying the data.
If your duplicate records do contain identical email addresses, you can instead merge them automatically.
For more information about the bill pay integration and how contact records are imported from your accounting software into Relay, please see the following articles:
Old Payee Records
If you have previously created payee records in Relay by manually adding them to your account, they may store payment information. For this article, we will call these the old payee records. The information that is stored in the old payee records will need to be transferred into the new payee records.
New Payee Records
When you import a contact record into Relay from your accounting software to integrate bill payments, Relay creates a new payee record. This is the record that will always be automatically selected when paying bills through Relay. However, it will be missing the payment information that was stored in the old payee record. As a result, we will have to copy the payment information from the old payee record into this new payee record.
How to Manually Merge Duplicate Payee Records
Here is the process of manually transferring payment information from old payee records into the new payee records.
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Go to the Payments tab → select Manage → click on Payee.
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Type your payee’s name in the search box to check if a duplicate record exists.
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Next, we want to check which payee record has the payment information saved. Once you click on the payee you will be able to view the payment information on the right-hand side.
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Click the eye icon beside the account and routing number information to reveal the payment information. Copy the account numbers and account type in a separate note — you will need these later!
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Now choose the new payee record from your search list that is missing payment details and click Edit.
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In the pop-up, scroll to the bottom and check for a message that says “This payee is synced from Xero”. If you see the message, you have selected the new payee record that was synced from your accounting software.
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Once you confirm that you have the new payee record selected, fill out the payment details you saved from your old payee record. Click Save.
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Now, go back to the old payee record, click Edit, and scroll down to the bottom in the pop-up modal.
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If you selected the old payee record, you will NOT see the message saying that “This payee is synced from Xero,” and you will be able to delete the payee.
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If you are certain that you correctly transferred the payee’s information to the new payee record that was synced from Xero, click Delete to remove the old record.
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That’s it! You can now go ahead and pay any bills with this payee that were imported when you synced Relay with Xero or QuickBooks Online.
Things to Know
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After you sync the bills from accounting software with Relay, new payee records will be created in Relay. These payee records will be automatically selected when paying a synced bill.
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You cannot delete payee records that were synced from your accounting software, you can only un-sync them.