Feature Request: Make Company External ID searchable in the admin top nav

[Colby]

For those of us building B2B implementations, the External ID field on the Company object is a critical piece of data — it’s typically the account or customer ID from an ERP or CRM, and it’s the primary key that ties Shopify back to the source of truth system.

The problem: the External ID field doesn’t appear to be indexed for search in the admin top nav. This creates a real friction point for merchant ops teams who want to look up a company by their ERP ID — which is often the identifier they know best.

The workaround most people land on is embedding the ERP ID into the Company Name itself (e.g. “Acme Corp - 10045”). That works, but it pollutes clean merchant data and creates downstream headaches for reporting, exports, and anything consuming that name field.

The ask is straightforward: index the Company External ID field so it’s searchable from the top nav alongside company name. This would be a low-friction win for any merchant running a B2B operation with an ERP integration.

Would love to hear if others have run into this — and if there’s a cleaner workaround I’m missing in the meantime.

[Kyle_W]

Good one, big +1 on this

@Colby IMO the best workaround for now is to create a company metafield with the filtering option enabled in the definition, like so:

The idea here is to copy the value from the external ID into a company metafield, whether that’s done manually or perhaps automated via something like Flow. Regardless, once the metafield values are defined, you can use the filter options in the Admin UI to filter the company list by the metafield in question, like so:

Filtering isn’t as intuitive as searching, but this approach keeps the company names a lot cleaner

[Colby]

Crafty! But dang… such a terrible UX these merchant face.