I Have Duplicate Contacts — How Do I Fix It?
Over time, duplicate records sneak in: someone is added once as “Bob Smith”, once as “Robert Smith”, once as “Smith Bob” with a typo. Each duplicate has its own slice of history, balance, and notes — making the full picture hard to see.
It also happens by design after moving from the legacy app. Legacy kept customers, vendors and partners in separate lists, so a business you both buy from and sell to came over as two or three contacts, one per role.
JewelTrak has a tool for this: Tools → Consolidate Contacts.
Most clients don’t know this exists. It’s the most common support call we get about contacts. You don’t need to ask — you can fix it yourself.
What it does
Pick a primary contact (the one you want to keep) and one or more secondary contacts (the duplicates). The tool:
- Re-points everything on the secondaries to the primary: invoices, payments, memos, repairs, appraisals, store credits, gift cards, stock they supplied, partnerships and phone numbers.
- Gives the primary every role the records held. Merge a customer record and a vendor record for the same business and the primary becomes both, with the customer’s type and price level if the primary had none.
- Keeps a merged vendor’s vendor number when the primary has none, so it still prints on tags that show it.
- Deletes the secondaries. There is no un-merge button, but JewelTrak keeps a full record of what each merge moved and deleted, so if two contacts turn out not to be the same, contact support and it can be reversed.
Merging needs the Merge Contact Records permission. Without it the page says so at the top and Review Merge stays off. You can still look up and dismiss duplicate candidates (dismissing needs permission to edit contacts), and ask an administrator to do the merge. If you can neither merge nor edit contacts, Consolidate Contacts doesn’t appear in the Tools menu.
The primary keeps its own contact details (name, address, notes, terms). Details that lived only on a secondary are gone once it’s deleted, so copy anything you need onto the primary before merging.
Two ways to find duplicates
The page has two tabs:
Manual
Search and pick contacts yourself. Use this when you already know the duplicates — for example, a customer just told you they have two records.
- Search for the primary (the one you want to keep) and click to select it.
- Search for one or more secondary contacts and add them.
- Review the merge preview, confirm, done.
Candidates
Lets the system suggest likely duplicates by matching on name + phone or name + email. Walk down the list — for each pair, either confirm the merge or dismiss if they’re actually different people.
Dismissed pairs stay dismissed (the system remembers and won’t surface them again).
What’s safe to merge
- Same person, two records → safe.
- Spouse / household members who share an address but are distinct people → don’t merge. Keep them separate; their purchase histories should not pool.
- Business and the person who works there → judgment call. If you always invoice the business, merge into the business record. If the person ever buys personally, keep them separate.
What can’t be undone
Merging is not reversible through the UI. Take a moment to review the preview screen before confirming. If you discover after the fact that you merged the wrong pair, restoring requires support.
Tip — preventing duplicates going forward
When creating a new customer at the till, the customer search box does fuzzy matching across name + phone + email. Take an extra second to glance at suggestions before clicking + New — most duplicates are created when staff are in a hurry and skip the suggestion list.