Insightly helps you stay informed and organized. But as your staff and CRM data grow, duplicate entries can still occur. In response to our customers’ requests for more duplicate prevention tools, we’ve added duplicate detection to prevent duplicates at the time of data entry and a SmartMerge tool to help you find and merge duplicate organizations.
Duplicate Detection
Insightly has long included duplicate blocking to prevent duplicate records from being created when you import records. We recently released an update to alert you to possible duplicates as you enter a new item in Insightly. With Duplicate Detection, after you’ve entered the name of a contact, lead, or organization on a new entry page, Insightly will check for existing names in your CRM that sound like the name you’ve entered. We’ll display a list of possible matches as soon as you’ve typed the name and moved on to the next field.
We’ll display up to five matches, and you can click the link at the bottom of the alert to check if there are even more. If you do find a match, you’ll save yourself and your colleagues some time and confusion by clicking through to the existing record to verify everything is up to date. This will help avoid creating duplicate records that will have to be sorted out later.
SmartMerge for Organizations
When duplicates do need to be sorted out, our new SmartMerge feature will assist you in finding and merging them. We’ve initially rolled out this new feature for organizations and will add it to other record types as our development team completes those updates. We just couldn’t wait to get it out to our customers.
SmartMerge helps you find organizations with exact or similar names and lets you merge them from a single page where you can inspect each record without having to open multiple tabs or windows.
You can run SmartMerge directly from the right sidebar on the Organizations page to jump right into a list of your organizations with matching names. Organizations with the same name will be displayed in groups, and you can deselect the checkbox next to any item you don’t want to include in a merge.
After clicking the SmartMerge Selected button, you can see the records listed on the right side of the page, inspect each organization’s information, and select which one will be the master record for your merge.
If you spot duplicates in your organization list, you can also select them and start a merge by clicking the SmartMerge button that appears above the list.
And if you suspect an organization that you’re viewing has a duplicate entry, click the Actions menu and select the SmartMerge option to search for organizations with similar names.
SmartMerge Reports
You also have the option of running a SmartMerge Report, which will scan your entire list of organizations for records with similar names and email you an actionable list in Excel format. A SmartMerge Report can be initiated from the bottom of the SmartMerge page. Insightly will search through your entire organization list and email you a list of organizations with closely matching names.
The report is in Excel format and includes links to each of the possible duplicates in Insightly, as well as a SmartMerge link to begin the merging process for a group of organizations. It’s a handy way to inspect your data for previously entered duplicates.
Like Insightly’s original merge process, merging records will bring new information like phone numbers, links, and addresses to the master record, merge together content in the Background field, and retain the master record’s values for integrations and single-value fields (like custom fields or viewing permissions).
Keeping your data clean and up to date is important for better business intelligence and higher productivity. With Duplicate Detection and SmartMerge, Insightly helps you keep your records in order.
