Removing Duplicate Contacts

Occasionally you may find duplicate Contacts. This can happen due to a variety of reasons, for example:

- An Admin adds a Contact without realising that the Contact already exists; it is always worth doing a search before adding a new Contact.
- Someone signs up via the website using a different email address; they may have changed their email address or forgotten which email address they had used previously.
- When someone is booking an event and the ticket requires the Contact for whom the ticket is being booked, they may create a new Contact rather then selecting an existing one (the default is to only allow selection of existing related Contacts; if this option is unchecked you may need to look out for duplicates).

Removing duplicate Contacts

The easiest and safest approach to removing duplicates is to merge them. This combines any associated data, e.g tags, membership, boats, bookings, orders, invoices etc so nothing is lost. (You cannot delete Contacts that have related data anyway so merging is best).

1) Go to the Contact you consider to be the main entry
2) Click the 'Merge..' button
3) Start typing the name of the duplicate Contact that you wish to merge in to the main one
4) Select the Contact form the drop down list
5) Click the 'Preview Merge' button
6) Scroll to the bottom of the list of items being merged and click the 'Merge Now' button

If there are further duplicates of the same Contact then repeat steps 2) to 6) until all the duplicates are gone.

Last updated 17:49 on 3 April 2025