Clearing autoname from customer record still updating vendor?

Hello,

I am under the impression that if you clear the checkbox for autoname on a customer record, you can manually enter a new name and not have it flow through to the associated vendor and/or partner records. But in testing this, I cannot find a way to label a related vendor record name field (entityid) differently than the customer record. This is causing problems in how we communicate with the customer vs the vendor in workflows. I would love to just delete the relationship between the two, but it appears difficult to do once transactions get involved.

Any help would be appreciated.