When the same person arrives twice

The same enquiry arrives twice. Once through the website form on Monday, once by phone on Thursday. Nobody is at fault; it is simply what happens. The question is whether you find out now or in a cleanup six months later.

What happens when you save

As a record is saved, it is checked against what you already have. If something looks like a match you are told immediately, with what it matched and on which field.

What counts as a match

Four fields are compared: email, phone, mobile and company name. The comparison is deliberately forgiving, because people do not type things the same way twice.

A strict, letter-for-letter comparison would miss all three, which is the same as having no duplicate checking at all.

It looks across four lists, not one

Leads, customers, companies and vendors are all checked together. The enquiry that came in this morning may already be a customer you invoiced in March, and a check that only looked at leads would never notice.

Block it, or just flag it

You choose what happens, in Settings → Duplicates.

Flag is the safer default. Block is right when two people enter leads and you would rather lose a minute than carry a duplicate.

The Similar tab

Every record has a Similar tab showing what it matched, on which field, and a link to open it. A real coincidence — two different people at the same firm — takes one click to dismiss.

Which fields are compared

You can narrow it. If your customers are mostly family businesses where five people share one landline, matching on phone will flag half of them. Turn phone off and keep email and company name.

Where to go next

• What happens to duplicates during an import
• Convert a lead once you know it is the real one