Record Validation for Duplicates: General Information

Duplicate records across your leads, contacts, customers, vendors, and business accounts can create data-quality issues that slow down your sales, marketing, and financial processes. Duplicates may lead to repeated customer communication, diminished productivity for your teams, and inaccurate reporting. Duplication is more likely when records are created manually, imported in bulk, or generated by extending an existing business account.

To help maintain clean and reliable information, MYOB Acumatica provides flexible tools for identifying, preventing, and resolving duplicate records.

Learning Objectives

In this chapter, you will do the following:

  • Become familiar with the process of duplicate validation, merging, and association of duplicate records
  • Validate individual leads for duplicates
  • Merge duplicate leads
  • Associate a lead with a duplicate contact
  • Validate multiple leads for duplicates

Applicable Scenarios

You may want to learn how to validate records for duplicates in MYOB Acumatica in scenarios that include the following:

  • You’re creating a new lead, customer, or vendor and need to check the record for duplicates and process any duplicate records.
  • You’ve imported to the system a batch of new leads, business accounts, or customers and need to check these records for duplicates.
  • You regularly validate all records in the system for duplicates, and it is time to again initiate this process.

Using Record Pairs in Duplicate Validation

In MYOB Acumatica, you can validate records for duplicates by using the rules specified on the Duplicate Validation (CR103000) form for the following predefined record pairs:

  • Lead to Lead: The system searches for duplicates of a lead among other existing leads.
  • Lead to Contact: The system searches for duplicates of a lead among existing contacts.
  • Lead to Account: The system searches for duplicates of a lead among existing business accounts.
  • Contact to Contact: The system searches for duplicates of a contact among other existing contacts.
  • Contact to Lead: The system searches for duplicates of a contact among existing leads.
  • Contact to Account: The system searches for duplicates of a contact among existing business accounts.
  • Account to Account: The system searches for duplicates of a business account, customer, or vendor among other existing business accounts, customers, and vendors.

For details about duplicate validation rules, see Duplicate Validation: Rules.

Applying Duplicate Validation Rules

The system applies the duplicate validation rules specified for the record pairs on the Duplicate Validation (CR103000) form when:

After record validation, the system inserts the Validated or Possible Duplicate status in the Duplicate box in the Summary area of the Leads, Contacts, or Business Accounts form. The validation status of a customer or vendor is shown in the Duplicate box of the linked business account.

Validating Records for Duplicates on Entry

If the Validate on Entry check box is selected on the Duplicate Validation (CR103000) form for a pair of records, the system validates the applicable records on entry. When you enter the settings (including the address and contact information) on the data entry form for the record from this pair and click Save, the system validates the records for duplicates.

Tip: Address and contact information refers to the settings on the General tab of the Leads, Contacts, Customers, Vendors, or Business Accounts form. This information may include the first name, last name, company name, country, postal code, email address, or phone number.

If at least one duplicate has been found, depending on the settings specified on the Duplicate Validation form for the record pair, the system does one of the following:

  • Saves the record without notifying you about the possible duplicate
  • Displays a warning dialog box asking if you want to save the duplicate record
  • Prevents you from saving a duplicate record and shows an error message

Also, the Duplicates tab appears on the data entry form where you create the record.

For details about validating new leads and contacts on entry, see Record Validation for Duplicates: To Validate a Lead for Duplicates.

Managing Duplicates

If you’ve saved a record with a possible duplicate, you can do the following on the Duplicates tab of the applicable entry form:

If the record on the Duplicates tab isn’t a duplicate, click Mark as Validated on the More menu to change the duplicate validation status of both records to Validated. If you validate a customer or vendor record, the Validated status will also be assigned to the linked business account.

Once the duplicates are merged or validated, the Duplicates tab disappears from the form.

Workflow of Duplicate Validation on Entry for Leads

The following diagram illustrates the workflow of duplicate validation on entry for leads. Although the diagram illustrates the workflow for leads, duplicate validation for other records works similarly.



Supporting User-Defined Fields During the Merge of Duplicate Records

If user-defined fields have been added to the forms of records validated for duplicates, you can display them in the tables on each form's Duplicates tab. To do this, open the Column Configuration dialog box for the applicable table and select the check boxes of the user-defined fields.

In the Merge Conflicts dialog box, the system lists user-defined fields that have the same attribute identifiers and different values in a target record and in a duplicate record. When you merge duplicate records in the Merge Conflicts dialog box, you can indicate to the system which settings to use: those of the target record, or those of the duplicate record.