Prevent Creating Duplicate Records (Accounts/Contacts)

[Lacertosus]

HelloCommunity,

Can youplease share some of your best practices with my on how to prevent users fromcreating duplicate accounts? I have seen a couple of paid applications on theAppExchange that are supposed to do that, but the reviews are not sogreat! 

This is anon-going issue for us where we are not able to force users to do their due diligencein thoroughly searching for accounts prior to creating new ones.

Thank youin advance for your reply 

[Stefan]

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Lacertosus wrote: I have seen a couple of paid applications on theAppExchange that are supposed to do that, but the reviews are not sogreat!

You can't have looked at Dupeblocker as the reviews are good!

We are using it,my impression is that it is a long way ahead of any other solution out there. We had to configure it to suit our purposes but the big problem we had of people creating duplicate Accounts and Contacts has almost gone away. 

I suggest you download a copy in your Sandbox of Developer environment and give it a trial.

Incidentally I just didn't see us letting users lose on it's functionality - too confusing - so have removed related lists and hidden most of the functionality. Created rules which either block on insert or allow and create a task for an administrator to check. On modify tend to always create a task for an administrator to check. 

One additional feature I would like to see is a warning dialogue box which a user can either click OK to save the record or return to the edit screen.

[Steve N Florida]

Prevent Creating Duplicate Records (Accounts/Contacts) by removing the ability to create them from those making the duplicates.  Have them email you or their manager requests to add.  Don't allow import by "sinners" require them to have you do it.

[Stevemo]

How large is your SFDC Org?  How many users, Leads, Contacts, Accounts?

Our SFDC Org is 100+ Users, 11,000 Accounts, 45,000 Contacts, and about 5,000 Leads.  

A few years ago we had a HUGE problem with duplicate Leads, Accounts, and Contacts.  We had ZERO budget for a Data Hygiene Tool so the data clean-up/merge was entirely manual.  

After doing all that the LAST thing I wanted to do was hand the keys to the store back to the users and have to repeat the whole process in a year.  

What I ended up doing is revoking Convert Lead and Create Account access from all User Profiles except Admoin and Executive Support (about 3 users).  

Then I built an Approval Process for users to submit a Lead for review before it is converted by myself or Exec Support.  In addition to preventing new duplicate records the improvement in overall data quality has been great.  

Before we did this we ran reports on Accounts by Created Date/Week and found that the number of Convert Lead requests would be about 5-10 per week, so the added workload on my end was negligible.