Accounts with foreign names... Ö Ä Å

I'd be glad to help you add customers and vendors with non-US letters, @Flyingkiwi. 

To start, let's resort lists in QuickBooks Desktop. This will fix any odd behavior in your master names list. 

Here's how:

1. From the Edit menu, select Find.
2. Select the Advanced tab.
3. From the Filter list, select Name.
4. Select the Name ▼ dropdown, then press Ctrl+L on your keyboard.
5. Select the Include Inactive checkbox. If it's grayed out, there are no inactive names.
6. Select the Name ▼ dropdown, then select Re-sort List.
7. Select OK.
8. Close and reopen your company file.

For more information, feel free to review this article: Re-sort lists in QuickBooks Desktop. 

If the issue persists, we can perform some troubleshooting steps to fix possible data damage. We can repair your company file using QuickBooks File Doctor. 

Here's how:

1. Close QuickBooks.
2. Download the most recent version of QuickBooks Tool Hub and save the file somewhere you can easily find it.
3. Open the file you downloaded (QuickBooksToolHub.exe) and the on-screen steps to install and agree to the terms and conditions.
4. From the tool hub, choose Company File Issues.
5. Click Run QuickBooks File Doctor.
6. In QuickBooks File Doctor, select your company file from the drop-down menu. 
7. Click Check your file (middle option only) and then select Continue.
8. Enter your QuickBooks admin password and then click Next.

You can also uninstall and run the earlier version. To learn more about this, please see this article: Release notes for QuickBooks Desktop 2021. 

In addition, let me share this article to guide you generate a customer group in QuickBooks Desktop: Create a customer group.

Keep in touch if you need further assistance managing your customer and vendor lists in QuickBooks. I'll be happy to help you more. Have a great day!

OK... I am going to dig deeper. Resorting the lists has no effect.

This affects some names, some even with normal letters, cannot find a common denominator yet.

The file doctor crashes when trying to check any QB file... The file can be seen in the drop down list, but not by browsing... 

*Unhandled exception has occurred in your application....

"Object reference is not set to an instance of an object"

I will dig deeper tomorrow.

@Flyingkiwi 

Consider open a dummy file and run a few scenarios to isolate the issue.

This gets more interesting... loaded the file on the old computer, no problems..

Checked Windows language and region settings to match.

- Made the mistake of recalling a transaction from an older sales receipt from one of the affected clients.

Then the system refused to let me close the window as the client "is not in the Customer:Job list" - even though I recalled the transaction from the list of transactions attached to the name in the customer Center.

The only way out of that was to force close (alt-ctrl-delete task task manager) Quickbooks...

The older computer has R4P R4_54 and the new computer reinstalled on R4P R4_31.

Multi currency is enabled.

I do not want to auto update and make things worse.

But.. the problem seems to have gone, for now... by re-adding the offending name (Sylvia Reijgård) twice (seems it needed twice) the original customer name began to work again. Renaming the other two with 1 & 2 and making them inactive seems to work. Delete them and the problem resurfaces.

And... the other random names that seemed to have blocked are now OK.

One account name caused others (surnames were close by in the database?) to also freak out.

Something is strange... but now I can get back to work and get June accounting done.
I will update later if I find more.
...
in summary...

- posting a donation from a customer with a surname with an å caused it to not be recognized as a customer, yet was in the dropdown list. The only option was to create a new one (exact same name, and that normally is not permitted). And it asks twice to quick add a new customer.

- A random number of other customers (even with English spelling) were also not recognized. They seems to be near the offending name at the bottom part of the alphabetical listing (R-Z area) (623 customers in the entire list)

- Going back into the customer center and renaming, and making the duplicates inactive re-enables the original name, and the others are magically working too - as I can tell.

More news as I find it.

(I did start on a dummy company file too, but it seemed better to rely on backups and work with the live data)

/Mike

How big is your QBW file size? Larger than 150-200 MB?

Nah... just 66 MB.. we are a small non-profit, but I do have 11 years of data on the file...

I wrote too soon... Same problem with some vendors now too... Keeps asking to add a new vendor... I now have 7 identically named vendors in the list, yet none of them are yet recognized... Ugh

I discovered after posting that I had the same problem with vendors!

One merchant "Överskotts Bolaget" refused to be accepted. While this existed in my Suppliers / Vendors list, I could not write a check to that name. Always,,,, Name not found... Quick Add or setup. However many times you set it up you get identical named vendors in your list bu cannot use any.

SOLUTION: By changing the Ö to a O (edit vendor)... most works again, other random vendors with English spelling have problems.

However, this is a workaround... QB should accept names with ÖÄÅ as well as accented É and so on...

What happened to make this crash? My QB has been bilingual on the US version since 2011. 

All this is happening on a ThinkPat T480 laptop i5 24GB Ram, Win10Home.... but it seems to be fine on the old computer (NUC Win10Pro)

Is this a win problem? As much as possible the settings are identical.