Name specified already exists on file

David contributed these comments (in blue) to this post. Thanks David for your feedback.

1. QuickBooks only allows the same name to be used once regardless if it's a customer, vendor, employee or other name. So if you have "Slippery Pete" as another name and you trying to import an invoice with this name, the importer will return an error since this name already exists. (So, for example, if you are trying to import an invoice for a customer with a company name of ABC COMPANY and it is not working, look to make sure that the name you are using matches exactly as how you have the name listed under your customer lists inside of QB. For example, you may have them listed as ABC COMPANY INC inside of QB under customers, but under vendors you have them listed as ABC COMPANY. If this is the case, you will need to change your import so the name of the company you are importing for invoicing is ABC COMPANY INC.)      QB also keeps track of inactive items too, so be sure to check your inactive list items if you get this error.  

If you are trying to import data into the Timesheets Section of QB, be aware that the employee name you are trying to import must match exactly as it is listed in the employee section. (Inside of QB you can view this by doing the following…..).  A common problem that we see is that the import might be Bob Smith but inside of QuickBooks, the employee is listed as Bob A Smith.  If you are still having problems, you might also check to see if your employee name inside of QB is listed by last name instead (for example, Smith, Bob A)  or the employee name you are using is Bob A. Smith, but inside of the employee section in QB, the name is listed as Bob A Smith (no period after A)   ) If this is the case, you again will need to change the name on the data you are importing to match exactly to how it is listed inside of QB.

2. Often the import file contains more than one space between a customer's names. Be sure your import file doesn't contain more than one space or you could receive this error since QB doesn't allow us to add a list name with more than one space between words.