Duplicate Entities
How the same company ends up in your CRM twice.
What It Is
A duplicate entity is the same organisation recorded more than once. Each copy has its own contacts, its own fields and its own history, so what should be one account is split across two records that neither of them knows about.
Zyntro can find and merge them, from CRM → Entities → Consolidate Entities. The thing to understand first is how it decides what counts as a duplicate, because that rule is narrower than the word suggests.
Why It Matters
Because a split account is worse than a missing one. Two records mean two partial pictures. The contact you are about to call sits on one of them, so the brief you get is built from half of what you know — and the half on the other record is invisible.
Because outreach gets embarrassing. Two people at the same company, on two different entity records, can receive two unrelated approaches in the same week. Nothing joins them up, because as far as Zyntro is concerned they work at different places.
Because the money follows the entity. Invoices, revenue and recurring invoices are linked to an organisation. Split the organisation and you split the account's commercial history, which is the kind of problem that surfaces at the worst possible moment.
How It Works
How duplicates are found
Zyntro groups organisations whose names are identical once capital letters and surrounding spaces are ignored. That is the whole rule.
Acme Ltdandacme ltd— found. Only capitalisation differs.Acme LtdandAcme Ltd— found. Only spacing differs.Acme LtdandAcme Limited— not found. Different text.AcmeandAcme Inc.— not found.Henderson GroupandHenderson Grp— not found.
Nothing is fuzzy. No abbreviations are expanded, no company suffixes are stripped, and nothing else about the record — website, location, the contacts on it — is considered.
Why they happen anyway
Most duplicates come from the organisation being typed rather than picked. The Add Contact form offers matching organisations as you type precisely so you pick the existing one, but a slightly different spelling creates a new record instead. Imports, forms and the API do the same thing at volume.
What merging does
You choose one record to keep — the primary — and merge the others into it. Zyntro then:
- Moves everything across. Contacts, leads, invoices, recurring invoices, revenue and payment contracts all follow to the primary record.
- Fills the primary's gaps. Where the primary has no location, website or logo and a losing record does, the primary gains it. Existing values are never overwritten.
- Keeps the higher Entity Score.
- Combines tags, removing duplicates.
- Combines socials and custom fields, with the primary's values winning wherever both have the same one.
- Marks the losing records as Merged. They stop appearing in your lists and in future scans, but the rows remain until you purge them.
What merging does not do
It does not look for near-matches, and it does not join up records that were never named identically — those you merge by hand after finding them yourself.
And it cannot be reversed. The losing record survives as a tombstone, but Zyntro does not record which contacts came from it, so there is no way to separate them again.
Examples
Two imports a month apart, both containing "Henderson Group"
Identical names, so the scan groups them. One merge and the account is whole again.
A form submission typed "Henderson Group Ltd" while your record says "Henderson Group"
Not found by the scan, because the text differs. You would spot this from two contacts showing differently-named organisation tabs, then merge them by hand.
The scan reports no duplicates
It means nothing is spelled identically. It is not evidence that your entity list is clean — most real-world duplicates differ by a suffix or an abbreviation.
One record has three contacts and an invoice, the other has one contact
Keep the one with three contacts and the invoice as the primary. Everything on the other record moves to it, so nothing is lost either way — but the primary's own values win any conflict, so the richer record is the better keeper.
You merge, then realise you kept the wrong record
There is no undo. Both records' contacts are now on the one you kept, and Zyntro does not know which came from where. The practical repair is to rename the surviving record and move contacts back by hand.
Important: Zyntro matches duplicates on the name only, and the match has to be exact. Capital letters and spaces around the name are ignored, and nothing else is. Acme Ltd and Acme Limited are two different organisations as far as the scan is concerned, and so are Acme and Acme Inc.
So a clean scan does not mean you have no duplicates. It means you have none that are spelled identically.
Warning: A merge cannot be undone. Zyntro records that the losing record was merged, but not which contacts came from it — so there is no way to pull them back out afterwards. Decide which record is the keeper before you merge, not after.
