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.

Finding the duplicates

You do not have to hunt for them. When some of your customers look like the same company, a notice appears above the customer list saying how many groups it found. Press Gennemgå dubletter to go through them.

Customers are grouped when they share an organisation number or have the same name, ignoring differences in capitals, spaces and punctuation, so "ABC-Tak AS" and "ABC - TAK AS" land in one group. The clearest cases come first. A number or name shared by more than ten customers is treated as a chain, such as a group of shops under one head office, and is not flagged.

In each group, click a name to open that customer in a new tab and check it. Untick any card that is really a different company, then press Flet dubletter and carry on from step 4 below. Up to five cards can go in one merge. Dismiss the notice with the cross if you want it gone for the rest of the session.

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 cards are shown side by side, each with what it holds and where it came from. The most complete card, the one with the most details filled in and the most people, deals and history on it, is already marked Behold dette. Press another card to keep that one instead.
5. 5Under Hvor kortene er forskellige, every detail the cards fill in differently is listed with the value the merged card will keep marked. Press another card's value to keep that one instead.
6. 6Check Bliver kasseret: the values that will not be on the merged card, so nothing is lost by surprise.
7. 7Press 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. Custom fields are combined, and a person linked to both companies keeps every role they had at either. The merged card is then removed, and a line on the timeline records which card was folded in and what it was linked to. A link or bookmark to the removed card opens the card it was merged into.

If somebody changes one of the cards while you have the merge open, the merge stops and shows you the cards again as they are now, so you never confirm a result you did not see.

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

Different organisation numbers or countries

Two cards with different organisation numbers, or in different countries, may well be two companies with similar names. The merge shows the difference and asks you to tick Disse kort er samme virksomhed before it lets you continue.

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.

e-conomic is the exception. Two cards linked to two different e-conomic customers can be merged here. The merge names both customer numbers and asks you to tick Disse kort er samme virksomhed first, because two different people can share a name. Once merged, the card you keep keeps its own e-conomic link, and the other e-conomic customer is remembered as part of it: the sync does not create it again, and any invoices or contact persons booked on it land on the card you kept. Nothing changes in e-conomic, so tidying the duplicate over there is still worthwhile, but nothing here waits on it.

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.