Merge duplicate customers

The same company ends up on two cards when it arrives twice: once from an import or by hand, once from your accounting system. Both cards are real records with their own people, deals and history, so one has to absorb the other rather than simply be deleted.

Merging two cards

1. 1Open Kunder from the sidebar.
2. 2Tick the cards that are the same company. Two is the normal case; up to five can go in one merge.
3. 3Choose Flet dubletter from the actions above the list.
4. 4The two cards are shown side by side, each with what it holds and where it came from. Press the one you want to keep, so it is marked Behold dette.
5. 5Press Flet.

Everything on the other card moves onto the one you kept: contacts, deals, subscriptions, invoices, orders, tickets, tasks, files and the whole timeline. Fields the surviving card has left empty are filled in from the card being merged; a field you have already filled in is never overwritten. The merged card is then removed, and a line on the timeline records which card was folded in and what it was linked to.

Merging cannot be undone from the screen, so read both cards before you press.

What happens to the accounting link

This is the part that matters when an integration is switched on. Each card carries the link your accounting system syncs by, shown on the card as the system's name and the customer number over there.

The link moves to the card you keep. The next sync then recognises that card as the customer it already knows and updates it, instead of finding a customer with no match and creating the duplicate all over again. Nothing is changed in the accounting system itself: the customer number over there is untouched, and no record is created, renamed or deleted there.

A card that was never linked simply inherits the other card's link, which is the ordinary case: a company you typed in yourself, plus the card your accounting sync created for the same company.

When the merge is refused

If the two cards stand for two different customers in the same system, such as two different customer numbers in PowerOffice Go or two different records in webCRM, the merge is refused and says so, naming the system and both numbers.

That is not a technical restriction. It is the only honest answer: one of the two records over there would be left without a card on this side, and the next sync would create that card again within the hour. Merge or unlink the two records in the accounting system first, then come back and merge here.

Branch offices are the usual reason for seeing this. A head office and its departments often share an organisation number while being separate customers in the accounting system, and those are genuinely separate cards, not duplicates.

People are merged separately

Duplicate people are their own job, with their own review screen that explains why two records look like the same person. See Find and merge duplicate contacts.

General background on how these connections behave is in Accounting and ERP integrations.