Overview
Teams working within Practifi regularly encounter a common question found in many data management tools: how should they identify and manage duplicate contacts and entities? To help firms maintain clean, accurate data and manage it more effectively, Practifi offers Duplicate Matching and Merging features.
Duplicate Matching Workflow
Users can catch duplicates at the point of entry into Practifi or when editing 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 can then click Back to update the record if the duplicate information was entered by mistake, or click Next to acknowledge 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 and determine whether we should begin merging them.
Merging Records
Once we have found a duplicate match, we can resolve it by merging the records in question. After clicking the View Duplicates hyperlink, the Potential Duplicate Records child window opens, allowing the user to review the flagged records. If the records are appropriate for merging, we can select up to three records, then click Next.
The user will then be asked to determine which Contact or Entity record contains the most relevant information for each main field of that record type. Use the radio buttons to make these selections field by field, designating one of the duplicate records as the Master Record. Once all selections are confirmed, click Next to approve the merge.
Once the merging is complete, you will have one record where there used to be two or three. If we happen to have more than three duplicates to begin with, we’ll need to repeat this process until we have only one.
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