i have a Zap that creates an invoice in Quickbooks online with a find or create customer step. i am having the find step search by Display Name, because the email address associated with the customer may change over time as people leave the organization.

the problem i’m running into is that one of the organizations that i asked QB to find has a colon in their name (e.g. “Awesome Sauce: The Best Company Ever”), and QBO has a rule that you can’t have a colon in the display name.

anyone have a workaround? it looks like you can’t search by anything other than Display Name or Email and the match has to be exact (it can’t search for partial match). i could change their company name to “Awesome Sauce (The Best Company Ever)” or something, but they might need their legal name on their invoice for some government reimbursement reason or something.

i can go back to creating invoices by hand in QBO, but would rather find a more clever solution. thanks for any ideas!