It's easy for duplicate records to creep into your database, no matter how careful you are to avoid it.  Workbooks detects duplicates using the main email address on Person records. On Organisations, it removes the common business suffixes from the end of the name, like Ltd or Corp, then does a 'starts with' search on Organisation names.  For example, for 'Aerosystems PR Ltd' Workbooks would consider 'Aerosystems Products' as a duplicate.

If you have duplicate records in your database, Workbooks has the ability to merge them together. Only Person or Organisation records can be merged and up to 5 records can be merged at a time.

You must have the Merge module enabled, and the user must have the Merge Duplicate Records Capability. The user must also have full permissions on the records that are about to be merged. NOTE: Merging CANNOT be undone and the duplicate records will be deleted once the merge has completed. Therefore, we advise that only System Admins are given this capability, especially if you have any integrations that would fail if the records required by the integration are no longer in the system.

Users with the Merge Duplicate Records capability will see a Merge button at the top of Person and Organisation records. As shown below, if Workbooks finds a duplicate, the button will change to orange and indicated the number of duplicates that have been found.

Click the orange button to view the duplicates that Workbooks has identified. 

1. Click Add additional duplicate records to open a search window where you can find other records that you know to be duplicates, even if the name is somewhat different.
2. Tick the checkbox(es) next to any records that show in the list that you know are not duplicates, then click Selected records are not duplicates.  This will stop the orange button from appearing in future.
3. Click Cancel Merge if you don't want to proceed in any way.
4. Tick the checkbox(es) next to any records that show in the list that you know ARE duplicates, then click Merge selected records. 

If you click the fourth option, Merge selected records, you'll see a screen similar to the one below, which will display each record you've selected to merge in a separate column.

 

By default, Workbooks treats the record you started with as the 'master' record and assumes you want the values in that record to be kept.  You can see that each field has a radio button next to it.  If you want to keep the specific field's value from one of the duplicate records, click the radio button next to that field  

NOTE:  If you have an integration with an external system, or regularly use Object References in your imports, then be careful that you are not deleting records with Object References that are used in these processes.

Clicking Next takes you to a screen showing you the values that be kept in your resulting merged record.  If you do not want to go ahead, click the cross in the top right hand corner of the screen.  If you're happy that the information is correct, click Merge.  You'll be asked if you're sure so click Yes or No as appropriate.

Any records with DLIs that had originally pointed to any of the merged records will be updated in the background so that they link to the correct place and show the correct record name.  Notes, Activities and Relationships to other records are automatically copied across to the remaining record.

The Contact Details tab of the record will now show a greyed out row for the previous Main Location Contact Details for each of the records you just merged together.

To help you identify duplicate records that haven't been highlighted with the orange merge button you can use the template reports that we provide for you. Three are available:

1. Template - Possible Duplicate Leads
2. Template - Possible duplicate organisations - suffix and prefix
3. Template - Possible Duplicate People

They give you some variants, providing counts of things like People with the same name or Organisations with the same name and postcode.  It's worth running them from time-to-time and merge anything appropriate to help keep your database as clean as possible.