Auto-Merge and Purge
Speed, and what it costs you.
Before You Begin
Both buttons appear on the consolidation screen after a scan, and both exist for the same situation: a duplicate list too long to work through one group at a time.
They are different in kind. Auto-Merge does what you would have done, without asking. Purge removes what merging left behind, and cannot be undone.
Steps
Understand what Auto-Merge decides for you
Auto-Merge keeps, for each group, the record with the most contacts — and where that ties, the oldest.
That is the same suggestion the manual preview makes, so on a straightforward pair of duplicates it reaches the same answer you would. What you give up is the chance to disagree: the record with fewer contacts but better data is merged away without being shown to you.
Everything else behaves exactly as a manual merge does, including filling the keeper's empty fields from the records being merged.
Set the group-size limit
Auto-Merge asks you to set Auto-merge groups where duplicate count is at most, between 2 and 10. Only groups with no more than that many records are merged; larger groups are left for you.
Set it to 2. A group of exactly two identical names is nearly always one organisation entered twice, and it is the safest thing to automate. Larger groups are where genuinely different organisations sharing a name turn up, and those deserve eyes.
Run it, then check the result
Confirm and Zyntro works through the qualifying groups, reporting what it merged.
Re-scan afterwards. The remaining groups are the ones above your limit, which are the ones worth your attention anyway.
Understand what Purge removes
Merging does not delete the losing records — it marks them Merged. They vanish from your lists and from future scans, but the rows remain, which is why the scan reports a Merged (Purgeable) count.
Purge Merged Entities deletes those rows permanently, for the whole organisation at once. There is no selection.
Decide whether to purge at all
There is little reason to rush. Merged records are already invisible in every screen and every scan, so leaving them costs you nothing but rows in a table.
The argument for purging is tidiness. The argument against is that a tombstone is the only remaining evidence that a record ever existed — the name, the fields, the date it was created. Once purged, even that is gone.
If you are consolidating a large CRM, a reasonable habit is to merge freely and purge only when you are confident the result is right.
Result
Your small duplicate groups are merged without your having reviewed each one, and the larger ones remain for you to handle by hand.
If you purged, the merged records are gone permanently. Your entity list, contacts, invoices and revenue are unchanged by the purge — only the tombstones were removed.
Warning: Neither a merge nor a purge can be undone. Auto-Merge makes that decision for many groups at once without showing you any of them, which is the whole trade. Start at a limit of 2, check what it did, and raise it only if you are satisfied with the result.
Tip: Work through the big groups by hand first. A group of seven same-named records is far more likely to contain two genuinely different organisations than a group of two. Dealing with those in the preview, then letting Auto-Merge clear the pairs, gets you both speed and safety.
