If you’ve been running jobs in Eano for a while, your Vendors list has probably picked up a few duplicates. It’s almost unavoidable: you set up “ABC Supply” properly in My Team, but when someone logs an expense in the field, they don’t stop to pick that record from the list — they just type “ABC” and move on. Now you’ve got two ABC entries. Maybe three. And when you go to see how much you’ve actually spent at ABC Supply this year, the number is split across all of them.

Vendor merge is the fix. It lets you pick the records that are really the same supplier and fold them into one, so all the spending and project history lands in a single place. Eano won’t do this automatically — we don’t want to guess wrong and quietly combine two suppliers that just happen to have similar names. You stay in control of every merge.

This is a cleanup tool for the faceless retailers and suppliers in your list — the places you buy materials, not the people you work with. Think of the stores that show up half a dozen ways because everyone types them differently: “The Home Depot,” “Home Depot,” and “THD”; “ABC Supply” and “ABC”; “Sherwin-Williams,” “Sherwin,” and “SW paint.” Each abbreviation and typo spawns its own record, and your spending gets scattered across all of them. Merge pulls them back into one canonical entry, so the totals for that supplier finally add up.

It is deliberately not a way to combine real user accounts — the subcontractors and team members who actually log in to Eano. That’s a different kind of record, and merge protects it. More on that below.

Open the People section, go to My Team, and click the Vendors + Subcontractors tab. That’s the same list where you add and manage your subs and suppliers.

Only Owners, Admins, Managers, and Superusers can merge or delete records here. If you don’t see the selection checkboxes or the action buttons, your role doesn’t have permission to manage vendors.

If your list is long, start by narrowing it. The Search by Name or Email box above the table matches on name, email, and phone number, so searching “ABC” pulls up every record with ABC anywhere in those fields. The Role dropdown beside it narrows things further, and you can sort the table by clicking a column heading.

Search is a temporary detour, not a one-way door. When you clear the box, Eano puts you back exactly where you were — same sort order, same page — rather than dumping you at the top of an unsorted list. So you can work your way down to page seven, run a quick search to check something, clear it, and pick up where you left off.

Right under the search box, Eano tells you how many records matched:

5 vendors match “ABC” Select all 5 vendors

That count is the whole match, not just what fits on the current page — which matters a great deal for what comes next.

Each row has a checkbox on the left, and the checkbox in the table header selects everything on the page at once.

For a long cleanup, the checkboxes alone are slow going. That’s what Select all N vendors beside the match count is for: one click selects every record matching your search, across every page. If you’ve got 200 entries that all start with “(SV)” because that’s how your team is trained to log small suppliers, you don’t have to page through them.

As soon as anything is selected, an action bar appears above the table:

Two things about that bar are worth knowing. Merge Vendors is available with a single record selected — because the record you keep is chosen separately, you don’t need to round up both halves of a pair before you can start. And once you’re in select-all mode you can still untick individual rows to carve exceptions out of the group; the count updates as you go.

Click Merge Vendors and a window opens titled Selected Vendors, with the count in the heading. It lays out everything you picked — each record’s name, how many projects it’s tied to, and when it was last active — so you can give the group one last look before committing. If you selected a large batch, the list is paged, and you can click through the pages to review it.

Under Choose which vendor record to keep there’s a search box reading Search for a vendor to merge into…. Type a few letters and pick the record that survives the merge. Think of it as the canonical entry — the “real” ABC Supply that everything else collapses into.

The important part: this search covers every vendor on your team, not just the ones you selected. That’s what makes the awkward cases workable. Say someone logged a pile of receipts under “Roofing Store,” and you know from the paperwork that Roofing Store is really ABC Supply — but with a thousand vendors in your list, the two will never land on the same page together. Select the “Roofing Store” record, then search for ABC Supply in the keep box. They never have to meet in the table.

Here’s exactly what happens when you confirm: everything linked to the other selected records gets reassigned to the record you keep, and the remaining records are archived. That covers expenses — both the ones where the duplicate was the supplier and the ones where it was the person being reimbursed — along with project assignments, work order assignments, and logged time. Where the record you’re keeping is already on the same project or work order as a duplicate, Eano drops the redundant link rather than listing the same vendor twice.

A good rule of thumb: keep the record you set up intentionally — the one with the complete profile and the contact details — and merge the quick, half-typed entries into it. Pending invitations don’t appear in the keep search, since there’s no established record there to carry the history.

When you’re happy with the choice, click Merge. You’ll get a confirmation that the vendors have been merged. On a big batch, Eano finishes tidying up in the background, so give the page a refresh if the merged entries are still sitting there a moment later.

This is the important guardrail. Merge is meant for the placeholder vendors nobody logs in as — not for collapsing actual people’s accounts together.

So if any record you’ve selected belongs to someone who has ever logged in to Eano, the merge window calls it out in a red panel: “N vendors can’t be merged — these vendors have logged into the platform before and must be removed before you can merge.” The offending records are listed underneath, and a Remove all link takes them out of the selection in one go. Until they’re out, the Merge button stays disabled.

This is all-or-nothing on purpose: if even one record in your selection has logged in, the whole merge is blocked rather than partially completed. It keeps you from accidentally erasing a sub’s real, working account. That’s especially worth remembering on a big select-all batch, where a blocker can be buried a few pages deep — the red panel surfaces it either way.

One useful subtlety: the restriction applies to the records being folded in, not the one you keep. A real account that has logged in can perfectly well be the record you merge everything into — it just can’t be one of the entries getting archived. If a logged-in account is sitting in your selection but it’s actually the one you want to keep, use Remove all to take it out of the group, then search for it in the keep box.

Pending invitations are a different story — those are people who were sent a link but never finished setting up their profile, so there’s no real account to protect. They can be merged in. When a pending record gets merged, its outstanding invitation is automatically revoked, so the link stops working and you won’t have a half-finished profile floating around.

If your plan splits your company into multiple teams, a merge has to stay within a single team — you can’t fold a record from one team into another. If your selection spans more than one team, Eano stops the merge and shows you a Vendors Can’t Be Merged notice listing which record belongs to which team. Records that aren’t assigned to any team can be included in any merge.

Sometimes a duplicate isn’t worth merging — it’s just junk you want gone. That’s what Delete is for. Select one or more records, click Delete, and you’ll get a confirmation asking whether you’re sure you want to remove the selected external users. As the dialog warns, this action cannot be undone, so take a beat before you confirm. Delete works on a select-all batch the same way merge does, which is a lot of reach behind one button — read the count in the confirmation before you click through it.

Delete is simpler than merge: it doesn’t ask you to pick a record to keep, and it doesn’t carry the logged-in guardrail that merge does. It just removes what you selected. If a record has expenses or projects tied to it that you care about, merge it instead of deleting it.

Will I lose the expenses logged against the duplicate records? No. When you merge, everything tied to the other records — expenses, project assignments, work orders, logged time — is reassigned to the record you keep. Nothing is lost; it all consolidates under the one record.

Can I merge into a record I didn’t select? Yes, and that’s the point of the keep box being its own search. It looks across every vendor on your team, so the record you’re keeping never has to be in the selection, on the same page, or anywhere near the duplicates in the list.

I only found one bad record. Can I still merge it? Yes. Select it, click Merge Vendors, and search for the record you want it folded into. You just can’t merge a record into itself, so the one you keep has to be a different record.

Why is one of my records flagged in red and blocking the merge? Because that record has logged in to Eano at least once, which makes it a real account rather than a placeholder vendor. Merge won’t archive logged-in accounts. Use Remove all to take them out of the selection, and the merge can proceed with the rest — or, if that’s the record you meant to keep all along, remove it from the selection and search for it in the keep box instead.

Can I merge a vendor that’s still a pending invitation? You can merge one in, but you can’t keep one. Pending invitations haven’t been activated, so they’re safe to fold into a real record, and doing so revokes the outstanding invitation link.

I ran a big merge and the duplicates are still showing. Give it a moment and refresh. The reassignment happens immediately; on a large batch, clearing the old records out of the list finishes just behind it.

Can I undo a merge or a delete? Deletes can’t be undone, so confirm carefully. With a merge, the records you folded in are archived rather than destroyed, but the cleanest path is to select thoughtfully before you confirm.

Why does Eano say my vendors are on multiple teams? On multi-team plans, a merge has to stay within one team. If your selection mixes records from different teams, narrow it down to a single team and try again. Records with no team assignment can be included anywhere.

I don’t see the checkboxes or buttons. Managing vendors is limited to Owners, Admins, Managers, and Superusers. If you’re on a different role, ask one of them to handle the cleanup.