Using Duplicate Matching & Merging

Overview

Teams working within Practifi regularly encounter a common question found in many data management tools: how should they mitigate and manage duplicate contacts and entities? To allow firms to manage their data more effectively, Practifi offers Duplicate Matching and Merging features.

• Duplicate Matching Workflow
• Merging Records

Duplicate Matching Workflow

Users can work to catch duplicates on entry into Practifi or when attempting to edit a record that appears to have a duplicate elsewhere in the system. When a user attempts to create a Contact or Entity that already has an existing record, they will receive the following error message: “This error occurred when the flow tried to create records: DUPLICATES_DETECTED.”

The user will then be guided to the Back button to update the record if the duplicate information was entered by mistake or use Next to accept the error and close the new record window without creating an additional Contact or Entity record. 

When a duplicate is found for two or more records in the organization, we will receive the following toast message: “It looks as if duplicates exist for this Entity/Contact. View Duplicates”.

Clicking the View Duplicates hyperlink will allow us to find all relevant duplicate records currently entered into Practifi to determine if we should begin to merge them.

Merging Records

Once we have found a duplicate match, we can fix the problem by merging or combining the records in question. After selecting the View Duplicates hyperlink, the Potential Duplicate Records child window opens and allows the user to review the records that have been flagged. If the records are deemed appropriate for merging, we can select up to three records and then select Next.

The user will then be asked to determine which Contact or Entity record contains the most relevant information for the main fields for that record type and allow us to choose the correct radio button field-by-field and maintain one of the duplicate records as the Master Record or original. Once we’ve confirmed all the selections are correct, select Next to approve the merge.

Once the merging is complete, you will now have one record where there used to be 2 or 3. If we happen to have more than three duplicates to begin with, we’ll need to repeat this process until we have only one.