Ensuring that your database is free of duplicates is important. It helps you keep a single view of your supporters, ensures you don't accidentally contact someone twice, and keeps your reporting accurate.
For People, Beacon has a dedicated system to suggest potential duplicates and makes it easy to merge them. For other record types, using Beacon's filters allows you to find records that may need to be merged.
Finding duplicate people
Beacon automatically checks every Person record against your entire database and flags up groups of people who appear to be duplicates. You can merge these people in a couple of clicks, or skip the suggestion if you'd prefer not to merge them.
In your views drop-down list in the top left of the People list page, you'll see the Suggested duplicates view.
On opening the page, Beacon will present you with a list of suggestions for you to consider merging, and the reason for the suggestion.
To determine if a record should be suggested as a duplicate, we use the following criteria:
Matching criteria | Priority |
1 | |
Name + Address | 2 |
Name + Phone number | 2 |
First initial and last name + Address | 3 |
First initial and last name + Phone number | 3 |
Records matching higher priority criteria will be shown first, ensuring you're able to deal with the most likely matches first.
Note: A matching name alone will not cause a person to be suggested as a duplicate. It's extremely common for people to have the same name, and it is not a good criteria on its own to determine if they're the same person.
Merging duplicates
If all the records in a group are the same person, you can click 'Merge all'.
If some records in a group are not a duplicate, select just the duplicate records and choose 'Merge selected'.
If none of the records in a group are a duplicate, choose 'Ignore'. These records will not be suggested again as duplicates for this criteria, though they may be shown for other criteria or if they match for another reason in future.
Dealing with conflicts
If a group of records has no conflicting data, when you click to merge they will be immediately merged into the one record. Any records related to each (such as payments) will all be linked to the new single record.
If a group of records has some data that cannot safely be merged, you will be prompted to choose which values you'd like the new merged record to have.
Adding columns
In some cases, you may want to show additional information about the people in your suggested duplicates list to determine if they are duplicates. You can add additional columns by clicking the column picker in the top right.
Finding duplicates in other record types
On all record types, you can use the 'is not unique' filter option to find records that may be duplicates.
This is especially useful for non-people record types, as the suggested duplicates system is a much faster and more accurate way of merging People.
For example, if you wanted to find a list of all organisations that have duplicate names, you could filter for 'Name is not unique'. You can then filter by that same column to group the records together.
When you find duplicates, you can merge them to keep your data nice and tidy.
Which fields you choose to filter by will vary depending on the record type and what makes it unique.
Considerations for different field types
The "is not unique" filter option is currently available for the following field types:
Person name
Short text
Email
Phone
Number
Currency
Percent
Location
There are few special considerations when using the "is not unique" option that are helpful to be aware of:
Short text
Uniqueness is case-insensitive, so "Beacon" and "beacon" would count as the same value.
Person name
Uniqueness is case-insensitive, so "Richard" and "richard" would count as the same value.
If you filter by "Name (full)", uniqueness is determined by only the first and last name. The title (e.g. Mr) and middle name are ignored.
Currency
Beacon makes it possible to store values across multiple currencies, so uniqueness is based on both the value and the currency code. (£5 and $5 are different)
Location
UK postcodes are auto-formatted when they are saved into Beacon, so uniqueness will be correct, even if you entered "sw112ae" and "SW11 2AE" when saving the data.
All other location values are treated as-is, which means "London" and "Greater London" will be treated as two separate, unique values.
Uniqueness is case-insensitive, so "10 Downing Street" and "10 downing street" would be treated as the same
Note: Remember - if using 'is not unique' with other filters, it will always look for uniqueness across all records of the type, not just the ones that match your other filter criteria.
For example, filtering for 'Email is not unique' + 'Address line one is not unique' may show you records where both email and address individually match different other records that aren't in your results.
Frequently asked questions
How often does Beacon check for duplicate People to suggest?
All the time! When every Person record is created, or updated, it is compared against all the other people that already exist in your account. Any that match the criteria will be added to your Suggested duplicates view immediately.
Can I change the criteria of the suggested duplicates view?
No. Checking for duplicates is a very intensive query for a database, and we've optimised our system to be lightning fast based on the criteria above.
What permissions do I need to merge duplciates?
Merging records requires that you have 'Write' permissions for all fields on that record type, whether from a list page or the Suggested duplicates view.