For agencies🏢 Agency Management
Find and merge duplicate customers
Spot customers entered twice, then merge them into one record or keep one as a billing group of the other.
Duplicate customers split your invoicing, job history and rate setup. OneTerp checks your customer list every time you open the Customers tab and tells you when records look like the same organisation. Nothing is combined until you say so.
Watch the walkthrough
0:39Clean up customers entered twice. · Open in a new tab
Step by step
- 1Go to Agency, open the Operations page, and select the Customers tab. If any customers look like duplicates, a banner says how many. Click "Review" (or "Duplicate check" beside the number of records at any time).
- 2Start with "Entered more than once": the same customer saved several times. Each copy shows its jobs, billing email and QuickBooks customer. Pick the one to keep and click "Merge into the one I'm keeping", and every other copy is merged into it in one go.
- 3"Same billing email" lists customers with different names whose invoices go to one address. That is often one billing office paying for several separate organizations, so only combine them if they really are one customer.
- 4"Similar names" groups names that start the same way. Click "Combine with another customer…" on one and choose which customer to combine it with.
- 5Two customers that belong together but are not flagged (a school entered under its own name, say, that should be a billing group of its district)? Click "Merge…" beside the customer on the Customers tab, search for the customer to combine it with, and carry on in the same dialog.
- 6To combine many at once, tick two or more customers on the Customers tab and click "Combine into…". Pick the customer to keep (it can be one of the ones you ticked) and each of the others becomes a billing group of it, keeping whatever invoice email, address and rates it had. Search the shared invoice email first to tick a whole organization in one go.
- 7In the dialog, choose "A separate office or branch" when it is a real branch or office: it becomes a billing group and keeps its own invoice email, address, payment terms and rates. Choose "The same organization, entered twice" when it is a duplicate.
- 8If they are not the same, click "Separate organizations" (or "Separate organization" on one row). OneTerp remembers the answer and stops flagging them together.
- 9Check the list of what moves across, answer any question about which rate or accounting customer to keep, and confirm.
Tips
- Invoices keep the name, address and totals they were issued with, past job numbers are never renumbered, and jobs already audited keep the price they were audited at.
- The QuickBooks link comes with the merge. If only the customer you fold in is linked, the one you keep takes over its link. If both are linked, you choose which one future invoices use.
- Changed your mind? Click "Duplicate check" beside the number of records on the Customers tab, then "Undo" beside the merge under "Recent merges". The link is there even when nothing is flagged.
- If a merge stops partway, the dialog stays open and says how far it got. Click the button again to carry on from where it stopped.
- A big "Combine into…" runs one customer at a time and can take several minutes. Each one gets its own Undo under "Recent merges". Once the first is combined, the customer you are keeping is locked, so the rest can't land somewhere else. A customer that can't be checked is left as it is and the others carry on. If you leave the page, tick the rest again and click "Combine into…" to finish.
- Combining makes billing groups under one customer, but each billing group still gets its own invoices.
- The customer you keep holds on to its own "Bill mileage" switch. If the two customers differ, the dialog warns you that the jobs moving across (those not audited yet) will start or stop being billed for mileage.
- Archived customers are left out of the check by default, and the review screen says so. To include them, turn on "Include archived customers in duplicate customer check" in Settings, Operations & Alerts, Duplicate Check.
- Merging needs both Customers and Billing access at the Manage level. Marking records as different needs Customers or Coordinate access at the Manage level.
- Records you mark as separate come back only if one is renamed to exactly match the other. A new customer with a similar name is still flagged. Your answers are kept under "Show dismissed", where you can put one back on the list.
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