Today, let's see how to find Duplicate records in your Zoho CRM account and Merge them.

Eliminating duplicate records in CRM seems to be a frequent issue for many businesses. Duplicate records can affect your productivity, increase manual work, and more importantly show incorrect data when it comes to reporting. Hence, it is crucial for businesses to have the ability to avoid creating duplicate records and the ability to merge duplicate records in CRM.

As a first step, we need to avoid creating a duplicate record. To do this we have the option "Do Not Allow Duplicates" available for unique fields such as an Email address and Phone Number. 

To enable this option, Click on the Setup Icon - Customization - Modules and Fields - Select the module as per your requirement. For example, Leads or Contacts. Now, when you click on the ellipsis icon on a unique field, you would see the option "Do Not Allow Duplicates" as shown below. Having this option enabled in the system would prevent you from creating another record with the same Email address or phone number. 

If you already have duplicate records in your CRM,you can use "Find and Merge Duplicate" or "Deduplicate" option. To 'deduplicate', go to the Leads or Contacts module and click on the ellipsis icon and select Deduplicate as highlighted below.

  The next page displays the unique fields using which you search and merge the duplicate records. 

Use the "Find and Merge Duplicates" option to search for the Duplicate records based on multiple criteria. To find and merge, open a Lead or a Contact record and click on the ellipsis icon as shown below.

 In the following page, you can find the criteria to search for the duplicate records. This gives you the option to select the fields individually for the master record.

Note:

• You can merge up to 3 records at a time.
  

• This feature is available only in the Leads, Accounts, Contacts, and Vendors modules.
  

• The records merged to the master record will be deleted permanently and the action cannot be reverted.