A duplicate company is when you discover two or more versions of the same company, where there were only supposed to be one. It can be quite normal to have the same company name many times, McDonalds would be an example. Sometimes you might even find companies with the same VAT number. In denmark different branch offices of the same bank might share VAT number. In cases like this you don't have to remove duplicate records.

But if you for some reason are left with two versions of one company you should remove the duplicate record as fast as possible. The typical reasons for duplicates are:

1. Your users creates companies themselves without noticing that the company is there already

2. A mass import of data have been done on data with too little information to identify the companies that was imported.

Lets assume that we have found a duplicate - and that we are going to remove it

The actual removal of the duplicate is really a merge of the two companies. From the duplicate record we keep the data that has not been stored on the original.
 

First you open the duplicate (clicking on it from a serch list or the history list). Thereafter you open the original (the company you want to keep), while you leave the duplicate open. This is done by shift-double click on the original.

Once you have both companies open in their windows you activate the original company and choose Merge. Once you confirm the system will merge the the information of the two companies remove the duplicate.

There will not be too much to check, but you can make sure that the original company contains what you expect.

If duplicates appears often in your CRM database, you can act proactively to avoid that duplicates are creating problems for the users of the system: