How do I merge duplicate members / people?

Duplicate members and/or people can arise for a number of reasons, including event booking or public new member forms where a known member or person adds them self again rather than logging in or identifying them self during the process.

To deal with duplicates you first need to identify them, you may find them in your day to day work or you can run the duplicate people report. Once identified, you can decided the the best way to merge the duplicate.

Duplicate People Report

This report is located under Reporting > Standard Reports in the Members category and is called Duplicate People.

Select the report from the list and click Run Report.

The report produces a list of possible duplicate people, matched on the person's First Name and Last Name.

See Exporting Standard Reports

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Once you have identified a duplicate person you need to decide how best to deal with them. The options are:

1. Move Person to Another Membership Use this option when the duplicate person should be on another membership. Typically this will be when the person exists or should exist on a group or corporate membership but has been created during the event booking process on another membership. Moving the person to a membership where they already exist as a person will result in them being a duplicate on that membership, but the 2 people can be merged together (see below).
2. Merge a Person into Another Person on the same Membership Use this when 2 records for the same person exist on the same membership. This may be the result of a person being moved or an event guest being entered more than once.
3. Merging Members Details Use this options when 2 membership records exist for the same person or group. Typically this will be when the person creating an event booking or a merchandise purchase is known to you but rather than identifying them self during the booking or purchasing process they re-enter their details thereby create a new record for them self. This can be avoided by enabling the Run Booking Contact Matches setting in Company Settings
4. While deleting the duplicate person may deal with the duplicate, it is not advised as data may be lost that cannot be retrieved.

See also:

• Move Person to Another Membership
• Merge a Person into Another Person on the same Membership
• Merging Members Details
• Exporting Standard Reports
• MemNet Data Structure