How to prevent incorrect merges?

Alan French

Obviously the main answer is “training” but we've had a spate of non-duplicate records merged in error where the constituents are actually relatives or just have similar names, and I'm wondering if there's anything else we can do that would flag any inconsistencies to the person doing the merge so that it's more obvious they're actually 2 different people? Some of them have been merged from a batch and others have been done through the “merge two constituents” task.

Has anyone built anything to make it easier to compare the records prior to merging?

Personally I would prefer that we only allowed admin users to perform merges but unfortunately that's not my call. How heavily do your organisations restrict access to merging record?

Michael Flynt

@Alan French Zuri Group has a duplicate compare tool that will display configurable side-by-side comparisons of merge candidates that might be a good match for what you are seeking.

If you prefer to roll-your-own bad merge mitigation, you could construct a table to hold pairs of unmergable constituents that you could populate manually or by rules. If you add to that a merge task that throws exceptions if such an unmergable pair comes through and include that task in your merge configurations, you should be able to prevent the worst. You could also use the same unmergable pairs to remove OOB merge candidates from their backing table(s).