Duplicate records can get created for a number of reasons such as bad input data or your contacts being really annoying and using their home and work emails interchangeably.
To merge a duplicate record go to the contact and click on the 'Meta' tab
Possible duplicates will appear in the in a list. Please note: Merging cannot be undone. Proceed with caution. Open the possible duplicate in another tab to check that they really are the same person.
Click 'merge duplicate into current record' on the relevant contact to pull together their personal data, as well as memberships, donations, tickets and payments, into one record.
Merging all of the related records to a contact may take time. Merge requests are queued, when complete a journal record is added explaining which records and fields have been merged.
Duplicate not suggested
Sometimes you know that two records are duplicates but Sheep is not suggesting them. Adding the same data to first name, last name, email, postcode or DOB will all "trick" Sheep into thinking they are duplicates.
Bulk Merging and the "Duplicate Stream"
The duplicate stream is a list of possible duplicate records and can be found in the streams section. We apply a similarity score and present the highest scoring results to the user. This makes it much faster to cleanup duplicates. (It also makes it much faster to make duplicate errors!)
If the duplicate stream is empty or if you believe you database has a large number of duplicates then please contact us through support and ask for "the duplicate stream to be built". Building the duplicate stream is computationally expensive so is only run on demand.
If you have many, many duplicates and need automated merging please contact us. We can automatically merge records based on a similarity threshold. (This is a chargeable service)