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            Guidelines for Merging Duplicate Accounts

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            Guidelines for Merging Duplicate Accounts

            Review guidelines for merging duplicate account records.

            Available in: Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic

            Business accounts available in: All Editions except Database.com

            Person accounts available in: Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions

            Watch Video DemoMerging Duplicate Accounts: Tips and Gotchas (Salesforce Classic)

            General

            Sharing Rules In Professional, Enterprise, Unlimited, Performance, or Developer Edition orgs, sharing rules are applied to the merged account. Also, manual sharing from the primary record is applied to the merged account.
            Redundant Relationships If you try to merge accounts that are indirectly related to the same contact, Salesforce displays a message suggesting that you remove the redundant relationships. On account records, indirect relationships are managed from the Related Contacts related list.
            Related Items, Chatter Feeds, and Attachments When duplicate records are related to items such as campaigns or activities, Salesforce relates the items to the merged record, with some exceptions. Chatter feeds are retained from the primary record only. Salesforce Files attached in the Chatter feed or Files related list are retained in the merged record.
            Mobile Device Support You can't use the Salesforce mobile app to merge duplicate accounts.
            Hidden and Read-Only Fields Salesforce retains any data in hidden or read-only fields, such as sharing settings, from the primary record. Hidden fields aren't shown while you merge. A merged record retains the Created By user and Created Date from the oldest record merged, regardless of which record is the primary. The record shows the merge date as the Last Modified By date.
            Account Hierarchy In Lightning Experience, you can choose the parent account to retain. In Salesforce Classic, the merged account retains the account hierarchy from the primary record.
            Non-Master Accounts The non-master accounts are moved to the Recycle Bin.
            Divisions If divisions are enabled, the merged account is assigned to the division from the primary record unless you select otherwise.
            Relationship Groups Lightning Experience doesn't support merging of accounts associated with relationship groups.

            Team Members

            Team Members from Non-Master Accounts

            The merged account retains all the team members from non-master accounts, even if the members are from different teams.

            You can only merge accounts when team members from non-master accounts have no values in unique custom fields. Before merging, either remove the unique flag from any custom fields, or clear any values from unique custom fields on the team member accounts.
            Permission to Merge on Teams To merge accounts to which a team member has greater record level access, you must have the Modify All Data permission on accounts. For example, suppose that you're the account owner but an account team member has more access on one or more child account records. To merge those accounts, you need the Modify All Data permission.

            Person Accounts

            Portal Support You can't merge person accounts that are enabled to use portal or Experience Cloud site users.
            Person Accounts and Business Accounts in Salesforce Classic In Salesforce Classic, if person accounts are enabled in your org, both business accounts and person accounts are returned when you search for duplicates. However, you can't merge a person account with a business account or the opposite. Person accounts display the person account icon (Person Account).
            Redundant Relationships In Salesforce Classic, if you try to merge person accounts that are indirectly related to the same contact or account, Salesforce displays a message suggesting you remove the redundant relationships. Indirect relationships with accounts and indirect relationships with contacts are evaluated separately. If you have conflicts with both, you must resolve them separately.
            Customer-Enabled Person Accounts When merging a customer-enabled person account with a person account that isn't customer-enabled, the customer-enabled account must be the primary record.
            Contact Point Objects Contact point objects don't support merging. Relationships between contact point objects and person accounts are lost after a merge.

            Experience Cloud Sites

            Permission To merge accounts associated with sites, you must have the Manage External Users permission. You also need permissions to delete accounts and edit related records such as opportunities and contacts.
            Including Site-Associated Contacts in Merged Record To ensure that the merged account includes contacts associated with a site, select the account with site users as the primary record.
            Experience Cloud Site Type When you merge accounts that have contacts associated with a site, the contacts must belong to the same type of site.
            Contacts Associated with Multiple Experience Cloud Sites

            When you merge accounts that have contacts associated with multiple sites of the same type, a contact's access to a specific site doesn't change. A site user's profile determines the site they can access.

            If two person accounts are merged and the profile for each account grants access to different sites, the resulting account can only access the primary account's site.
            Partner Accounts

            When you merge a non-partner account with a partner account, the partner account must be selected as the primary record.

            When you merge a partner account with a non-partner account, the owner can't be changed.

            Enterprise Territory Management

            • If a territory was manually assigned to one of the merged accounts (for models in all states), the territory is manually added to the merged account.
            • Account assignment rules run on the merged account for the active territory model only if you select Default for the Evaluate this account against territory rules on save checkbox on the applicable account page layout's layout properties.
            • If the merged value of Exclude from territory assignment rules = true, then:
              • Territory assignment rules aren't evaluated even if the Default checkbox for the Evaluate this account against territory rules on save checkbox is selected on the applicable account page layout's layout properties.
              • Existing rule-based territory associations in the active model are removed from the merged account.
            • For territory models in non-active states (Planning or Archived), rule-based associated territories don't change on the merged account even if the merged account field values don't match the rules.

            See Also

             
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