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Check for duplicates

Finstral Contacts has a function that can detect duplicates of enquiries and contacts. For data protection reasons, this function is not applied to all data, but only within your Finstral Contacts database. This ensures that no duplicates have to be maintained within your Finstral Contacts. However, it may well be that the same enquiry or contact is also in the database at Finstral itself or with another partner. 

Whenever new enquiries and thus contacts are entered into your Finstral Contacts, an automatic duplicate check is carried out on the basis of your own database. Duplicates are enquiries from contacts with the same e-mail address that are already stored in the system. They mainly arise from enquiries made by the same person via the website. The system automatically reports such duplicates with the note “Check duplicate”. 

Procedure

At this point you must check the differences between the existing and the new contact, then decide whether you want to use the existing or the new contact, or whether the new contact should also be created with a different e-mail address. 

The following options are available for this:

  • Clicking on “Use existing” means that you also want to use the existing address data for the newly received enquiry and discard the new contact data. The enquiries will be merged with the existing contact.
  • Clicking on “Use new” means that you want to use the new contact data of the newly received enquiry and overwrite the old contact data. The enquiries are merged into the new contact. 
  • Clicking on “Also save new contact” means that you want to keep the existing and the new contact data and thus save the newly received enquiry to a new contact with a new e-mail address.

Note 
Duplicates are not (yet) enquiries and therefore neither findable in the search nor visible in the enquiry list to team members with read rights. To do this, the current processor must first check and resolve them.

Example

  1. You receive an enquiry with the note “Check duplicate”. This means that an enquiry has been received from a contact that already exists in your Finstral Contacts database with the same e-mail address.
  1. Clicking on “Check duplicate” takes you to the screen for checking duplicates. You can also see the detailed view beforehand.

  1. In the screen for checking duplicates you can see the contact that is already in the database on the left, with the newly entered contact on the right. You can now see the differences in the contact data and select one of the three options (“Use existing”, “Use new” or “Also save new contact”).