Salesforce Tip: How to Quickly Find Duplicate Accounts and Contacts

You’ve probably noticed the potential duplicate notification on an account or contact before.  

Hopefully, you don’t see these notifications often and try to resolve them quickly. Having duplicates in your CRM can create a lot of issues like misrepresenting lifetime donations or volunteer hours.  Your staff and constituents, rightly so, are expecting that the data in Salesforce is correct.
This duplicate notification occurs when the combination of your matching rules and duplicate rules think that two or more records are similar enough that they could be duplicates.  Salesforce has some basic matching and duplicate rules configured, but you should review and adjust them.  We recommend reviewing these rules at least 2x per year to ensure they are right for your organization.   If you need help thinking through how best to set up these rules, feel free to reach out to me.
How many potential duplicates do you have?  Creating a “Potential Contact/Account Duplicate Report” is an easy way to find and eliminate duplicates.  
Here’s how:

• Create a new report type:  Go to Set up the type in “Report Type” in the search bar and click on Report Types.

• Click on the “New Custom Report Type” and start creating your new duplicate finder report, then click next.   We recommend creating reports both for Accounts and Contacts.

• The Account will be selected as object A.  Click on  “relate another object” and choose the object “Duplicate Record Items” object B

The report will now contain all accounts that may have duplicates.  I recommend creating a similar report type for contacts.
Create a report from that report type:

• Start by creating a new report and choose the new duplicate report type.

• Click on the filters tab and ensure that all your Contacts are includes in your report

• Add the fields “Full Name” and the “Duplicate Record Item Name” at a minimum.  These fields will be linked to the contact and duplicate records.

• Run the report and see how many potential duplicates, according to your matching and duplicates, are in your Salesforce.  (You may want to cross your fingers.)

• Clicking on the full name will open that record and allow you to start the dedupe process.

As always, reach out to your support email address if you require any assistance.