top of page

Detect and merge duplicate records

To help ensure data integrity, ChilliDB has features that prevent, identify, and eliminate duplicate records.


Preventing Duplicates


ChilliDB has duplicate protection for Contacts, Client Administration Clients, Organisations and through many modules such as ATAPS. When you try and create a record, ChilliDB will present a number of matching records if any are found, and give you opportunity to view those records, cancel your creation, or continue to create your record.




Duplicates can still occur especially when using Web Controls, or Data Loader, or just user error.




Duplicate Detection


To help you maintain quality data, ChilliDB makes available Duplicate Detection tools under the System menu > Data Management > Duplicate Detection.




From there, you can choose a module in ChilliDB, and it will present a list of records which look like they could be duplicated. You can then work through them and expire those records which are duplicates.




Duplicate Merging


Duplicates identified using the duplicate detection can be merged.




All fields for the source contact/organisation and relationships to other modules such as contacts, notes, events, membership, etc will be transferred to the target contact/organisation. However existing information in the target contact/organisation will not be overwritten. Once the process has completed the source contact/organisation will be expired




Merging Process


To select the records to merge you must navigate to System>Data Management>Duplicate detection. Then select a module to check for duplicates held in that module. After you have done this a list of records that are potential duplicates appear.


If you cannot see your duplicates here, you can change the name of the duplicate record so it matches the record you want to merge with and the duplicate detector will pick it up. Click the number of occurrences to show the duplicates.




Here you can select the record you want to keep (target) and what should merge with it (source). Once merged, the source record will be expired.


Contact Merge Rules


When doing a contact merge, contact references are updated in the following modules


  1. Organisation

  2. Note

  3. Event

  4. Membership

  5. Case

  6. Client admin

  7. Survey

  8. Asset Register

  9. Contract Management

  10. Document Register

  11. QI

  12. Distribution List

  13. Group

  14. Contact role

  15. Quick links

  16. Appointments

  17. All custom live data fields of Contact type


Below are some rules for what fields can and cannot be transferred. Remember, fields in the target contact cannot be overwritten, new information is only added if the field is empty. You can work around this by manually emptying fields in the target contact if you know the source contact holds the correct data.

















Organisation Merge Rules


For organisation merges, Organisation references are updated in the following modules:


  1. Contact

  2. Note

  3. Event

  4. Membership

  5. Case

  6. Client admin

  7. Survey

  8. Asset Register

  9. Contract Management

  10. Document Register

  11. QI

  12. Distribution List

  13. Group

  14. Contact role

  15. Quick links

  16. All custom live data type of Organisation type



Below are some rules for what fields can and cannot be transferred. Remember, fields in the target organisation cannot be overwritten, new information is only added if the field is empty. You can work around this by manually emptying fields in the target organisation if you know the source organisation holds the correct data.




















62 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Data Loader Guide

The purpose of this utility is to allow ChilliDB users to import multiple records retrieved from a list of values stored in an external CSV, XML, XLS, or XLSX file. Currently it is possible to import

Data Loader Tips

Some tips / Notes concerning the files used for data import: When uploading excel files you don’t need to use special column delimiters or row delimiters Make sure the data in your excel columns match

bottom of page