Combine Duplicate Customers
Catching a duplicate before it’s created is one thing. Most of us are dealing with the ones that are already sitting there. Maybe it’s from before the warning we wrote about last week even existed. Maybe someone imported a batch of customers from an old system and a few slipped through under slightly different names. Either way, you’ve got two records for what’s really one customer, and until now the only fix was picking through both by hand and moving things over yourself.
Combine Customer does that for you.
Open the customer record you want to keep, the good one, the one with the right name and address, and go to Actions.
That’s the important part to understand up front: whichever customer you open this from is the one that survives. Everything else folds into it.
Picking the duplicate
Click Combine Customer, and BigWave takes a first pass at finding the duplicate for you. It’s the same matching that watches for duplicates when a customer gets added in the first place, just pointed backward at your existing customers instead of a new one. If it finds a likely match, it’s sitting right there with a reason attached, matched on phone, matched on address, whatever it caught.
Don’t see the one you’re after, or know it’s a customer BigWave wouldn’t have flagged on its own, maybe a business and the person who owns it? Search for it directly underneath. Nothing about this step locks you into whatever BigWave suggests.
Seeing what’s about to move
Before you commit to anything, BigWave lays out exactly what’s coming over: work orders, sites, projects, assets, payments, billing addresses, documents, contacts, with a count next to each one.
If a site is involved, you’ll get asked how to handle it, keep it as a separate property under the surviving customer, or fold it into one that’s already there if it’s really the same address. BigWave will suggest a likely match, but pairing sites is left to you, since getting that wrong means burying one property’s work order history under the wrong address.
Click Combine, and it’s done in one shot. No half-finished merges. Either the whole thing goes through or nothing does.
What actually happens to the customer you keep
The customer you launched this from doesn’t change. Not the name, not the address, not the tax settings, none of it. Combine only adds to that record, it never overwrites it. Whatever was on the duplicate that doesn’t already exist on your good customer just gets left behind: any custom field values on the losing side, for instance, don’t carry over. If it mattered, it should already be on the record you’re keeping.
Work orders are the one thing that never gets touched in a way that could lose history. They move over to the surviving customer, but they’re never deleted, not even the ones from years back. Contacts move too, though if a contact on the duplicate is clearly the same person as one already on your customer, same name, same email or phone, BigWave leaves the duplicate contact behind rather than giving you two entries for the same person.
Once the combine goes through, the duplicate customer disappears from your active list. The record itself isn’t gone. It’s kept quietly in the background with a note pointing to where it went, in case a work order history question ever comes up and someone needs to trace it back.
One thing will stop a combine before it starts. If the duplicate customer has an outstanding credit balance, BigWave won’t merge it until you’ve settled that up. Money doesn’t get folded into another account silently, you handle it first, then come back and combine.