You must have the Full Write People permission to see and resolve potential duplicate person profiles.
Duplicate person profiles can happen for a variety of reasons. While One Church Software does its best to prevent duplicates from happening in the first place, some will inevitably get through. The system makes it easy to find these and merge the duplicates.
To see the list of potential duplicates, click on "People" in the left-hand navigation and then on the "Duplicates" tab.
The table has the following columns available:
First Name - the first name of the person
Last Name - the last name of the person
Reason - the reason they were flagged as a duplicate. Possible values are Phone, Email, and Address.
Shared - this is the contact detail the two profiles shared. It will be either an email, phone, or address.
What can I do about it?
Each potential duplicate has two actions that can be done on them. They are found at the end of the row.
Merge
Clicking on the "Merge" button will open the standard merge tool pop up with both profiles automatically populated for you.
You can click on each person profile to open them up in separate tabs to make it easy to compare all information. Review the information from both profiles and click on the "Perform Merge" button at the bottom to finish.
Important: the system will choose the profile that has payment details saved (such as a saved credit card or bank account) as the primary profile.
Ignore
If you believe the match is not a duplicate, you can simply ignore the match and the system will not consider the two-person profiles as duplicates anymore. The person will be removed from the list
What is considered a potential duplicate?
The system will perform the following steps on every combination of profiles to determine if the profiles are possible duplicates.
Match people who have the same first three letters of their first and last name
...and share a contact detail such as an email, phone, or address (primary or non primary)
If they both have birthdays, ignore if they have a different birth month and year.
If they both have a middle name, ignore if they have a different first letter of the middle name.
When searching contact details, the head of household for the person's primary family is also considered. Potential duplicates within a family will not be returned as that would result in false positives.