The documentation seems to say that two accounts with active memberships can be merged, but we get a n error message popup if both accounts have membershiops. We have to delete a membership to merge the accounts. Once the merge is completed, the contribution(s) for the deleted membership show up in the merged account's contributions tab but not in the contributions pane of the membership.
Is what we're seeing normal Tessitura behavior? Maybe we've overlooked a setting?
We seem to be processing more merges lately due to web contributions generating duplicate accounts, and we'd love to find a way to make the membership data on merged accounts more accurate. . .
Glad to hear you found the document.
As Bob posted earlier, there is sample code in the LP_VALIDATE_CUST_MERGE procedure that prevents the merging of accounts with memberships. This sample code is active, so it’s possible your organization never actively decided to prevent the merging of records with memberships. If you want to allow those merges, you just need to open up that procedure and comment out the relevant code. The merge document does recommend commenting out all the sample code, but it doesn’t specify what the code does if you don’t comment it out.
Kevin Sheehan
Documentation & Learning Resources Specialist
Tessitura Network
+1 888 643 5778 x 329
ksheehan@tessituranetwork.com
Following up:
We tried commenting out the code blocking merge for active memberships in our test system. We found that TX_CUST_MEMB is updated by the native function but not TX _CONT_MEMB. So new membership is created in the merged account, likely with overlapping dates, instead of desired behavior to roll into the existing membership, or otherwise following membership rules set up in campaigns. .
We had on hand a rarely-used custom utility for assigning contributions to memberships. When we process the merge by deleting a membership, merging, then assigning a contribution to the merged membership, we get our desired result. Maybe we even did this previously didn't document the exact process or lost the complete documentation.
In any case, our process now works for our needs, though it seems overcomplicated to achieve a fairly simple membership merge. I would prefer to see the native merge function handle the contribution data at the same time as the membership data.
Hi John
If you already have the code to follow your logic, that would be probably fairly easy to convert into a step within LP_CONST_MERGE, which is called before and after the Tess merge code, to let you add your own processing steps to the merge process.
We do quite a bit of specialised processing in there now, including some code written for us by Tess poppets that does something like what you want, I suspect, ie "If merged memberships have contributions attached move the contributions to the kept membership and recalc."
Happy to post that code snippet if you'd like to see it... actually, i've just remembered that it's already posted on my files page - an old version, but it has the membership stuff in it.
Ken