Merging records

When you are dealing with a significant amount of records within a database, it’s almost impossible not to encounter duplicates. Just recollect that situation when you searched for an account, lead or contact in the global search and the system gave out two or even more duplicate records. You may have been tempted to just delete one of the records and in result all the history and data connected with it. However, that’s not the best solution here. The simplest and most recommended way out of this annoying situation is to merge the records together. The merging operation will leave only one record, which will contain all the information from duplicates.

Let’s figure out how to use this functionality. To illustrate the process, today we’ll try to merge lead duplicates. We navigate to Lead > check the records that should be merged > click the Actions > select Merge option.

In the next window, you can see all the information concerning the records that will be merged and here we are able to select which one we prefer to leave. For example, our lead records have two different assigned users (Brendon Lewis and Jim Williams), so we can define to which employee the record will be assigned. Let it be Jim, in this case. The same thing is with all the other fields. When you’ve defined, which information will be left, you have to press Merge button.

Once we’ve performed a merge, we can see a newly created lead record that preserves all the data associated the merged records.

Still, there are a few things that one has to remember when merging records in EspoCRM:

• one is able to merge only 2 – 5 records at once;
• one can merge records belonging to the same CRM module only;
• if merged records have different values in the same field, there will be created one more custom field to store this information.

Hope the information was useful for you! Thanks for paying attention!

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