Find and merge duplicate contacts

Duplicate people are normal in a CRM: the same person arrives from a company register, from a spreadsheet and from your accounting system, and each route creates its own record. DealJourney looks for them and offers them to you grouped, from Se gjennom duplikater on the Kontakter page.

Nothing is ever merged for you. Dette er forslag og kan være feil — du bestemmer hva som slås sammen. The scan only groups and explains; you pick what happens.

What is actually compared

The name is what groups records together. First and last name are joined, capitalisation is ignored and repeated spaces are collapsed, and two records land in the same group when that result is identical. Nothing else puts two records in a group on its own — two records with the same email address but differently spelled names are not offered as a pair.

This is the single most useful thing to know about the check: it will not find "Jon Hansen" and "John Hansen", and no amount of matching email addresses will make it. Those you find by searching.

Three further checks then say how sure we are, and each is shown on the group as its own reason:

• Samme e-postadresse — the same address on two of the records, compared ignoring capitalisation and surrounding spaces. The strongest signal there is.
• Samme telefonnummer — compared as digits only, so the same number written with a country code, spaces or dashes still counts. Numbers shorter than seven digits are ignored rather than guessed at.
• Knyttet til samme selskap — two of the records are linked to the same company.

A group with only the name in common is offered as Lav sikkerhet and is exactly where the check is most likely to be wrong, because common names are common. Read those before merging. A blank field is never treated as a match: two records with no email are not "the same email".

⟦Fant ingen sannsynlige duplikater.⟧ means no two contacts share a normalised name. It does not mean your data is clean.

Which record to keep

The one suggested as Beholdes is the most complete: one with an email address wins over one without, then one with a phone number, then the one linked to the most companies, and the oldest record settles a tie. Velg hvilken oppføring du vil beholde. De andre slås sammen med den og fjernes.

What a merge does

• Company links move over, and the roles held at each company are combined rather than replaced. A person who was one record per company ends up as one person with several companies — see Add a contact to a company.
• History follows the person. Activities, deals, orders, support tickets, text messages and sequence enrolments are all re-pointed at the record you kept.
• Empty fields on the keeper are filled in from the records being merged: email, work and mobile number, job title, LinkedIn address, postal address and birthday. A field that already has a value is never overwritten.
• The other records are then deleted, with a record of what they held kept for tracing.

Merging cannot be undone from the screen, so work through the Høy sikkerhet groups first and treat Slå sammen alle as a bulk action for groups you have actually looked at.

Contacts that arrive from Tripletex or another ERP

A contact pulled in from an accounting system is matched only on the link stored the first time that person was synced — not on their email address and not on their name. That has one consequence worth understanding:

• A person you already had in DealJourney, who has never been synced, arrives as a second record. The pull does not look for them by email first. This is the main way ERP duplicates appear, and finding them afterwards is what the duplicate review is for.
• Once linked, later runs update that same record instead of adding another.
• A contact with no company on the accounting side is skipped rather than created without one.

Going the other way — sending one of your contacts to the accounting system — does check first: within the same company it looks for a contact with the same email address, and failing that the same first and last name, and links to that one instead of creating a duplicate over there.

Merging here changes DealJourney only. The accounting system still holds both people, and the record you merged away keeps its link to a person that no longer exists on this side. Tidy the duplicate in the accounting system too, rather than only here. General background on these connections is in Accounting and ERP integrations.

Duplicates from a spreadsheet import

That is a different cause with a different fix — an import can update the records you already hold instead of adding new ones. See Avoid creating duplicates.