Note: Before reading this article, it's important to understand the relationship between Contacts and Profiles.

If you have mistakenly added a contact to a profile with no relationship to it, you can learn how to remove contacts from profiles here.

Occasionally, you may encounter a situation where you have a couple with a combined Profile, but have recently gone through a divorce or break up. You'll now want to separate them. It's important to make sure that the software reflects this, because otherwise, they may still be able to access each other's information.

To best deal with this, you'll want to end up with two different Profiles for each member of the couple and give them no access to each other's information and future positions. To do this, please follow the following guide to ensure you retain your data's integrity through this process 👍

This article explains how to create a new Profile for an existing Contact. 

So if you have two participants, you'll end up with two profiles. One for each individual.

You can do this from the profile's Position tab at the top of their profile page. You will need to remove the contact from the household and create a new household for them in their new profile.

If you do not do this, the household and members will remain linked, and you will not be able to give individual households to each participant.

Now that you've created a new Profile for each of the contacts, you can remove their access to the original Profile.

To do this, change ALL Participants' statuses to Unspecified.

This stops everyone from being involved in this original, archived profile, and from seeing anything related to it when they log in.

An important step is to also check the email addresses on record for each contact and make sure that they are in order. We often see only user out of a couple filling out the Fact Find, as they will both do it together at the same computer, negating the need for a login for each person. It's crucial to make sure these logins both appear as expected 👍

You then want to archive the profile. By doing this, you can retain the historical evidence of their situation together, but remove it from being active.

Note: If you wish to keep the joint profile active, read point 5 below to understand what effect this may have on the information shared 👍

To do this, click Archive Profile located under Actions next to the profile name.

Don't worry, you can always bring it back to being active by simply pressing on Restore Client at the top of the page if you do this accidentally.

This can be done by clicking Edit Details in the Contacts box and then heading to the Relationships tab. 

Your clients will now have two separate Profiles, with their Statements of Position showing separately on each of their Profiles. From here, you can easily create separate Opportunities for the clients, without worrying about them being able to access each other's information.

As you can see, only the individual profiles are available to be accessed now.

It’s important to recognise that some couples might split up, and still need to have a profile together active in Trail to represent their joint financial position. In this case, be aware that any shared assets of either participant in the original profile may be visible through the shared profile to the other participant.

For example, if Person 1 has re-married, and owns a joint property with their new partner (Person 3), this information will pull through to the shared profile of their old partner (Person 2). Why? That’s because the bank needs to see this information as part of the mortgage application 👍

It may be helpful to leave notes on both the archived profile as well as the new ones to let other team members know about your clients' situations. We do recommend that you do this if it fits in well with your existing workflows.