Handling Duplicate Contacts

How to handle Possible Duplicate contacts in your Organisations Contacts database.

Updated over a week ago

TidyHQ strives to make it as easy as possible to have a clean, well-structured contacts database, but... over time for one reason or another, duplicates may arise in your organisation's contacts.
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Fear Not though... With our Possible Duplicates Tool, TidyHQ is making it easier than ever before to identify, merge and remove duplicate contacts.


How are Duplicates Identified?

It's important to remember that the 'Possible Duplicates' tool is not automatic, and is not perfect. This tool will ONLY make suggestions to Organisation Administrators and the Administrators will need to manually use this tool to clean up their database.

The Possible Duplicates list is essentially a Smart Group, that identifies possible duplicates based on one or more of the following criteria;

  • Full Name (Default)

  • Contact Email

  • Contact ID Number

  • Phone Number

  • Company Name

NB: It's also important to note that once you've merged two or more Contacts, the process cannot be undone.


Step by Step Instructions

Step 1 - Open the Possible Duplicates Tool

Open the Possible Duplicates Tool, Contacts > Possible Duplicates, located in the sidebar of your Organisation Dashboard.

Step 2 - Possible Duplicates List

The list of all Possible Duplicates will now Open, as illustrated in the screenshot. Along the top are a series of Checkboxes with the label 'Show Duplicates By' (Red Underline) that will allow you to select or deselect the criteria used to identify duplicates, and also shows you the total number of Possible Duplicates in the top right (Circled in Red).

Step 3 - Merging or Ignoring Possible Duplicates

Each possible duplicate will appear in a self-contained list based on the Contacts Full Name, which is the default, and will show a list for each selected criteria above the list.

We recommended using a minimal number of criteria to identify your duplicates before Merging or Ignoring the Duplicates, as some may appear in multiple lists if too many criteria are used.

Step 3a - Merging Duplicates

There are two ways to Merge Contacts using the 'Possible Duplicates' tool.

  1. Merge All # Contacts Button - This will merge the entire list shown in the Possible Duplicates list.

  2. Merge Selected Contacts - Using the Checkboxes at the left of each list, you can merge only selected Contacts.

Important Notes before Merging Duplicates:

  1. Once you've merged two or more Contacts, the process CANNOT be undone.

  2. The Merge Tool will Merge ALL of the Contacts identified in the 'Possible Duplicates' list.

  3. If one or more of the Contacts DOES NOT need to be merged, you will need to manually merge the Contacts

Full details on how to Merge Contacts are available HERE.

Step 3b - Ignoring Duplicates

Clicking Ignore will remove the Contacts from the Possible Duplicates List. Clicking Ignore will cause the page to reload after a few seconds.

If a new contact happens to match one of the criteria, all of the ignored contacts will reappear next time you run the Possible Duplicates, in the same way that new contacts will be automatically added to a Smart Group based on specific criteria.


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