Duplicate Contacts

After using Simple Accounting for a while, you may find that you or your co-workers have entered apparently duplicate Contact records. Duplicates are annoying for three reasons:

·   First because you may not be able to tell at first glance which record of a pair is the one you want.

·   Second, you may have activities stored for both records which really should all be a part of a single Contact.

·   Finally, the more extra records, the slower the program will respond.

So it is important to be able to easily identify, combine, and then remove duplicated records.

 If you have already identified a single pair of duplicates, you can consolidate them into a single contact from Security Extensions in the Clean Up Menu.

Identifying Duplicates

Simple Accounting allows you to select from several search methods to identify possible duplicates. This is necessary because different users may need to determine duplicates in quite different manners. For some users, identical company names may indicate a duplicate. For other users, duplicate contact names are an indicator, as in the case of a contact who has moved to a new company; she now has two contact records with the same contact name, but with one record indicating the old company, and the other record indicating the new company. Still other duplicates may be identified by phone number, in the case of a company that has changed its name, but maintained the same phone number; you may accidentally have two records for the same company which share only the same phone number. Simple Accounting addresses all these needs with a few keystrokes.

Procedure

WARNING: No other users should be logged in while this procedure runs!

1. Begin by selecting Duplicates from the Contacts Main Menu.

2. The Find And Remove Duplicates Window opens. Select the Search Method you prefer for identifying duplicates:

·   Organization Name & Contact Name

·   Organization Name & Phone Number

·   Contact Name & Phone Number

·   Phone Number & State

·   Address & Phone Number

·   Organization Name & Zip Code

Simple Accounting flags as duplicates those records that share the same value in the fields of your chosen search technique. Press [Proceed] to confirm your choices, or <Esc> to cancel and return to the Main Menu.

Example: To illustrate how the search technique works, look at the following example. Here all records that have the same COMPANY NAME and CONTACT entries will be flagged.

ALLISON TOOLS BOB EDWARDS (313)-289-0811 

ALISON TOOLS GLORIA RANDALL (313)-289-0811

JENKINS CO. F. JENKINS (313)-321-9011

JENKINS COMPANY FRED JENKINS ( )- –

The first pair are matched because they both share the same phone number, which is fortunate since the company name in the second record is misspelled. The second pair are matched because they share the same contact LAST NAME and the first initial of the FIRST NAME. This is how Simple Accounting finds matches by contact name, so that ‘F. Jenkins’ ‘Fred Jenkins’ and ‘Frederic Jenkins’ are all considered the same person.

3. After processing for a minute or so, a browse box with one record for each possible match. This means that you’ll have at least two records for each possible match: and one of them is possibly (but not necessarily) a duplicate. To remove a duplicate, simply press <Ctrl Space> to tag the record as a duplicate. You can tag as many records as you like in the list.

4. A final warning appears. Press [OK] to proceed.