Rock U - People - Merging Duplicate Records

Transcribed Video Content

Okay. So let's talk about duplicates emerging. No matter what you do, duplicates will happen. In fact, the more customer service you have towards your members and attendees, the more duplicates you'll have. So for instance, if you have event registrations and you don't let make them log in to do the the event registration, which is a nice thing, saves them some time, it's possible that you'll get some duplicates. Now whenever we're adding records into Rock, we're always trying to look for a duplicate before we make a new record. But if we can't find a match on an exact match on first name, last name and email, we'll often have to create a duplicate. So let's go ahead and look at how we identify duplicates and how do we process them and merge them in Rock. So let's just say I'm looking for a record. And I come in here and I see, oh, Thomas Miller and Tom Miller, these are actually a duplicate. So, what I can do is I can go ahead and select these and at the bottom of any person grid, there'll be this merge duplicate records button. Now, if I push that, one of two things will happen. If I have rights to do the merge, I'll go right into the merge screen. If I don't have rights to do merging, I'll be filling out a duplicate request which will go then into your data integrity reports. And they'll go ahead and do the merge. So, not gonna actually merge it right now. I wanna go show you a few more locations where you can see this duplicate, information and then we'll do the merge when we're all done. Okay. So, if we go under, tools, data integrity, there's a whole bunch of reports in here and there's a separate video on that. But the two that I want to just point out, again is under merge requests, you'll see those merge requests for those who didn't have rights to actually do the merge. So you want to keep your eye on this. You want to be processing this probably daily, but if you're maybe a smaller organization, you might be able to get by with it weekly. But the longer you wait, the more that this data is being actioned upon, and looking at different attendance and possibly some different giving and that can cause some inaccurate reporting. So the quicker you can process these the better. The other and we went over this again the data integrity video is just this duplicate finder. And we're actually behind the scenes trying to find these duplicates for you, but sometimes you're gonna find them as you're doing the search. So this is a lot, the the search. If we want to do the duplicate, we just pick the duplicate records and then we'll hit, the merge person records at the bottom. Now, this will take us to the actual merge screen. Okay? And so what Rock is gonna do is it's gonna try to figure out which of these records is the primary record and which is the secondary. It's using a lot of things to do that but primarily the date that the record was entered. And so from here, it selected this, this one record to be the primary and so it's gonna choose its attributes as the correct ones. Now, can look over and I can, correct this if I want. So for instance, the first name, I might actually come over here and pick Thomas, since Tom was already a nickname. The member and connection status of members is correct, so I want to keep that. Now, if it was the case that this secondary record had, attribute or a property that the first record didn't have, it'll automatically create that. So in a in a case where there is no data, the fact that the record that has more data is gonna be chosen. Now, when I'm done here, just hit merge records and that merge will take place and I'll end up at the person, detail screen. So that's how you find duplicates and merge them within Rock.