People Utilities - Finding Duplicate People

On occasion, you may end up with duplicate people records in the system. This can happen in several different ways. For one example, an admin may accidentally create a new person record for a student not realizing that the admissions coordinator actually already admitted and enrolled that student from the Admissions/Leads module, thus creating the person record. This is only one example, but to clean up multiple people record duplicates we have a great tool to help you out. NOTE: it is highly recommended you give this responsibility to one of your admins and have them run this utility on a periodic basis.

1. Go to People > Other > People Utilities
   
2. Click on Find Duplicate People
3. This is going to take you to the Possible Duplicate Person page. Here you will be able to select from a list of people BigSIS recognizes as duplicates. 
4. By default, this table will return results of people records where all of the characters match. For example, John Smith and John Smith. If you would like to compare person records that may have less than all of the characters matching you can use the Compare Length filter to choose the character length you want to filter by. This will help by including people records with names like John Smith and John D. Smith, or Cynthia Jones and Cinthia Jones. The system won't include those people with the default filtering because each name doesn't fully match. Follow these steps to change the compare length.
   
5. Once you have decided your filtering preference you will want to now select the desired records to merge. 
   1. NOTE: If you locate records that you know are not duplicate records you can select a record and click on the Mark as Not Dup button.
6. You can first click Merge Preview if you want to preview the records you are going to merge.
   1. Important: When using the Merge Preview, please select only one row at a time. Each individual row is a "duplicate-pair," there are two columns and each column contains one half of the possible duplicate-pair the system found. You can only apply the Merge Preview tool on one row, or duplicate-pair, at a time. Incidentally, the reason you see two rows for each duplicate-pair is that the system is locating the match from both directions (e.g., it first notices that A1 has a possible duplicate, A2, and then it goes from the other direction and finds that A2 has a possible duplicate, A1). If you merge either row of duplicate-pairs, both rows will disappear.
7. If you would like to quickly merge many rows at once, you may use the Bulk Merge tool instead. Select as many rows as you'd like and then click Bulk Merge. Keep in mind, though, you will not see a preview for each merge if you use the Bulk Merge option.
8. Once you have completed using the Bulk Merge option, you are done!