I was working in a company that used Salesforce CRM to manage its business. Recently, we discovered that multiple duplicate accounts exist for the same customers, as different users entered similar accounts without checking whether they already existed.
To fix this, I decided to merge duplicate accounts in Salesforce to keep all customer information clean and consolidated under a single account record.
In this article, we will learn about how to merge accounts in Salesforce. In this, I will explain how to enable the merge account feature and how to merge duplicate accounts into a single one.
Enable Merge Accounts in Salesforce
Before merging accounts, we need to make sure the Merge Accounts feature is turned on in Salesforce. If this feature is not enabled, let’s enable it first.
To merge the records in Salesforce, the user must have the following permissions:
- Delete and Edit permissions on the Account object.
- Read access to the accounts involved.
Next, you should have a matching and duplicate rule on the object, so that Salesforce will find duplicate records according to the defined matching fields criteria and identify duplicate records.
Merge Accounts in Salesforce
Now, let’s understand how to merge accounts in Salesforce. In the image below, you can see I have opened one account record, and there we don’t have any duplicate accounts.
Now, as I open another account record, you can see that we have one record that is a duplicate of this account. Now, to merge this account with another, click the View Duplicate button.
Next, we select the accounts to merge and then click the Next button to proceed.
Now, we need to select the field values to keep in the merged account. From the selected accounts, we can choose one value for each field, and that value will be saved in the final account after merging.
After that, click the Next button.