So we are finally ready to start tackling merging duplicate records! Sadly we have quite a large amount to tackle first. About 12,000. Gulp. What I'm thinking of doing is running the identify dupes procedure once and then scheduling the merge procedure to run nightly so that any dupes that were scheduled that day get merged and off the list.
After we tackle those then we had decided to schedule the procedures to run weekly, but I'm interested to hear how often other organizations schedule these procedures to run. Do you find it's better to do it daily or weekly?
Any advice on how to get our massive amount of duplicates down quickly? I think we're going to divide the alphabet up so we can have several people working on scheduling them at once.
Thanks!
Christina,
It sounds like you have some work ahead of you but a good plan. We run the identify weekly (early Monday morning) then merge scheduled dupes nightly. This works well for us since it gives me a week to schedule all of the identified dupes. Having the merges done nightly is great for gift entry. For example someone makes a gift online and a dupe account is created. If there is a membership on the existing account and the gift is a membership gift, I like to merge the accounts before I do the gift entry - its cleaner for the memberships. Having accounts merged nightly lets me do gift entry of online gifts in a timely manner. Having merges happen only once a week would be inconvenient.Dale