Business Central - Merging Record

“An original is worth more than a copy” -Anonymous

For those who came back from Summit in Orlando, I am sure you have made lots of connections, contacts, and some of you, new customers! One of the pain points when you have multiple people entering records is that you’ll have potential duplicates. To some degree, they may have a slight variant of the company name but essentially the same record.

With duplicate records, this can cause issues with proper analysis and reporting. So it is important that you have a clean record to maintain by removing or in this case, merging records in Business Central. One of the most common asks in the early Dynamics NAV days is the ability to merge records.

So let’s take the most common duplicate records, Customers. Below is an example of a duplicate customer that we want to merge the two records.

Please note: You must have “MERGE DUPLICATES” permission set to use this functionality. You can perform this functionality on Customers, Vendor, or Contacts.

Open the main account that you want to maintain, in this example, I’m going to use older record, Adatum Corporation. From the customer card, under the Home Action Bar, click on “Merge With…”. A separate window will pop up then click on Merge With… dropdown to choose the other record you want to merge.

When record gets pulled into the Merge Duplicate page, you will have the option of which fields you want to override. For example, I want to use the Alternate Value from the duplicate record to use the Search Name for ADATUM CORP. So I would check the box for Override. Once you decided of which values to override, then click the Merge button to finalize.