Finding and Merging Duplicates
How duplicate contacts and companies are spotted, warned about, and merged.
What this is
Two things working together:
- A warning when you create something that already exists. Add a contact whose email, phone number or full name matches one you already have, and you'll see who it matches before the record is created.
- A cleanup page at Settings → Duplicate Cleanup that scans your whole database, groups the duplicates it finds, and merges them into one record.
Why it matters
Duplicates are how a CRM quietly stops being trustworthy. Two records for the same customer means half their deals sit on one and half on the other, your reports undercount, and someone phones a client who was called yesterday by a colleague looking at the other record.
They creep in from ordinary use — an import, a website form filled in twice, two people adding the same client on the same day. Catching them at the moment of creation stops most of it; the cleanup page handles what already slipped through.
When it triggers
A duplicate is flagged when a new record shares one of these with an existing one:
Contacts — the same email address, the same phone number (compared digits-only, so `043 726 8134` and `0437268134` match), or the same first *and* last name.
Companies — the same name (ignoring capitalisation), or the same website domain (`https://www.acme.co.za/about` and `acme.co.za` count as the same).
Deliberately conservative: matching is on exact-ish values rather than "looks similar". A warning you don't trust is a warning you learn to click past.
How to use it
When the warning appears: you'll see what it matched and why, with a link to open the existing record in a new tab. Either go work on the record you already have, or click Create anyway — sometimes two people at one business genuinely share a switchboard number, and you're the one who knows.
To clean up existing duplicates:
- Go to Settings → Duplicate Cleanup.
- Each group shows why the records matched, when each was added, and how many deals, tasks, notes and documents are attached to it.
- Pick which record to keep. The one with the most attached history is selected for you, since that's usually the real one.
- Click Merge.
What merging actually does
Everything attached to the duplicates — deals, tasks, activity notes, email logs, invoices and quotes, attachments, QR Code Pro references, and (for companies) their contacts — is moved onto the record you kept. Any field that's blank on the kept record is filled in from the duplicates, so you don't lose a phone number that only the duplicate had. The duplicates are then deleted.
It runs as a single database transaction: either the whole merge succeeds or nothing changes. A half-merged record with orphaned deals would be worse than the duplicate it was meant to fix.
Merging can't be undone. Run an export first if you want a safety net.
Permissions
Everyone can see the Duplicate Cleanup page, but merging requires the same permission as deleting records — because that's what it ultimately does. See Granular Permissions.
What isn't deduplicated
Deals are never treated as duplicates. Two deals for the same client with the same title are usually two real jobs.
Your public lead capture form handles this differently and automatically: if someone submits it twice with the same email, the existing lead is updated and their new message appended, rather than a second lead being created. Nothing to review, nothing to merge.