Duplicate Detection

Duplicate Detection is another form of mass update, where NetSuite identifies duplicate customers, contacts, vendors, and/or partner records, and can merge the duplicates into a master record or delete the duplicates.

The administrator sets the criteria that NetSuite will use to search for duplicates on the Setup | Company | Duplicate Detection screen. One can choose an inpidual criterion, such as a name, or use multiple criteria simultaneously. This selection is as much an art as it is a science, and it relies on knowing the intricacies of the data. If you are too aggressive, you risk deleting non-duplicates, whereas the opposite is also true; by making the search too specific, actual duplicates will be excluded. A name is an obvious criterion to use, but it is usually not sufficient, as companies and people can have the same name. It is, therefore, useful to include a unique identifier, such as a zip code or phone number. Once you have saved the criteria, NetSuite begins to identify possible duplicates:

Duplicate Detection settings

Duplicate records display a warning at the top of the screen, advising the user that this record may indeed be a duplicate. The warning contains a hyperlink to a list of the duplicate records for further analysis.

Administrators can view a full list of possible duplicates in Lists | Mass Update | Entity Duplicate Resolution. There are options to mark records as either DUPLICATES or NOT DUPLICATES. The NOT DUPLICATES option prevents a non-duplicate that conforms to the criteria from always appearing in the duplicate results.

The administrator can choose to delete duplicates or merge them into a master record. The best practice is to select merging and not deleting, because all of the information in the duplicate records will be lost upon deletion. A merge will preserve the history of that record and simply copy it over to the master record.