Help with duplicates.

Hi community!

I need some help:

How can I merge duplicates when importing contacts into SuiteCRM? I can do it by ā€œFirst Nameā€, ā€œLast Nameā€, etc., but not by phone number. Every week I have to import a lot of contacts into the database, and I want to avoid adding duplicates. How can I do this? Any ideas?

Maybe useful:


Hello Patryk,

does it have to work via an import?
And if so, do you have validators across all source systems that ensure that for instance the phone number format is identical everywhere?

What I’m doing for more mature projects / scenarios is a 2 - 3 level check:

  1. email
  2. phone number (with re-formatting before duplicate check to ensure a unique format)
  3. match strings like street + postal code + city (with regex etc. logic to clean issues like street and st.)

I usually do that via API and external logic - CRMs are a bit limited there.

If you need to stay with the import, there is a small customization that you can do, in order to add your fields for duplicate checks:
https://support.sugarcrm.com/documentation/sugar_developer/sugar_developer_guide_14.0/data_framework/vardefs/working_with_indexes/#Example_2

There are some further details on data / data imports:

and should it be too late already, that’s how can merge duplicate records in the CRM: