Merging duplicate accounts in Salesforce is a crucial step towards maintaining a clean and reliable CRM system. Duplicate accounts can lead to data inconsistencies, confusion, and hinder effective decision-making. Mergin duplicates is a very importance process, it enhances data accuracy, streamlines workflows, and ultimately boosts the overall efficiency of your Salesforce platform. 

If you are looking to auto / bulk merge you data then you might want to check this article: automatically merge duplicates in Salesforce in bulk


Single merge: To merge duplicate accounts in Salesforce (using Salesforce's Vanilla tool) you first need to have Duplicate Rules activated in order to generate a Salesforce duplicates-report. Once the rules as set and the report is ready, you will be able to see the duplicates. Salesforce tool will allow you to merge up to three accounts and it will also offer you to preserve the data you select aka surviving data. This can be done both in Salesforce Classic and Salesforce Lightning. In both scenarios the remaining account will be known as a Master account / record. With the Vanilla tool you will be able to select exactly one value for the master/surviving record which may create a new data-integrity problem for certain fields such as phone (if the 2 records that you are merging have 2 different phones then it is only logical to keep them both) keep on reading and you will find the solution for the data-integrity problem and how to mass merge more then 3 records in Salesforce + the option to mass merge multiple duplicate-groups into multiple unique records.

Finding Duplicates in Salesforce

Sales-rep usually spot duplicate accounts / records during repetitive sales cycle and through angry replies to a persistent campaign emails. It is recommended to avoid those pitfall and to find those duplicates before they find you, create a duplicate records report (Salesforce gives the steps here). To track different objects (Accounts, Leads, and Contacts), you need separate reports.

Blocking new Duplicates

You can use the standard Salesforce rules to identify duplicates based on a matching rule (criteria). The folks at SFDC have also gone even further and allowed you to set up alerts rules that will notify the user if a duplicate exist in your CRM, The admin has the option to allow / block the creation of new duplicates. You can set these options for existing rules (SFDC standard rules) and for custom rules.

Blocking new duplicates is NOT recommended for every use-case!
For exmaple:

• Would you block a duplicate lead coming from a website form when the original lead was created 30 days ago? Wouldn't it be better to auto merge the leads and mark the master it as relevant / hot lead and to add a new task for that lead due for today?
• Would you block a duplicate case coming from your website when the original is still open and was created yesterday? Wouldn't it be better to auto-merge the cases and preserve the old + new information?
• Would you block a duplicate lead coming from your marketing-automation tool when the original lead was created 7 days ago? Wouldn't it be better to mark it as relevant / hot lead and to add a new task for your sales-rep due for today?

Salesforce's Duplicate Rules Limitations

With Salesforce you can only merge up to three records at one time and preserve exactly one surviving value while losing the others. For example when you merge two accounts with two different phones with Salesforce's merge you will lose one phone (with zaapit you can transfer the second phone to the mobile/fax/other field).
In addition to the above, If you have a few dozen of duplicate accounts you will be able to merge them manually, but if you have more duplicates (like most activate CRM users) then the merge job will take more time. With ZaapIT on the other hand you will be able to mass merge 200 rows in one click or setup an auto-merge job and clean those duplicates automatically.
Salesforce merge can only merge contacts, accounts, leads and cases, you can use ZaapIT’ s app to merge other objects.

Try ZaapIT for FREE Now!

Who can merge accounts in Salesforce?

The following roles / profiles have the permission to merge accounts and / or other objects in Salesforce (dedupe).

1. The org’s System Administrator (admin). Most rules that apply to users in the org do not apply to the admin because, well, they’re an admin, admins have the modify all / delete all permissions enabled for them.
2. The Account owner of the accounts that you’re trying to merge. This user will have more restrictions than the admin.
3. A user with a higher role in Salesforce than the Account owner (in some cases this option will not be available when hierarchy recording sharing is disabled through Salesforce's setup > sharing setting).
4. A user with “delete all” permission for the Account object. If this user is not the account owner, they need that “delete” permission, as well as “edit” permission for Cases and Opportunities.
5. A user assigned to a permission set with the modify all / delete all permissions enabled for the relevant objects (accounts + related objects)

Merging Duplicate Accounts / Contacts / Leads in Salesforce Classic and Salesforce Lightning

To merge duplicate accounts manually in Salesforce classic go to the account's tab page > click the merge Accounts link under the tools section> click the find accounts> choose up to 3 duplicate accounts > choose the master record > choose the surviving values >  click the merge button.
To merge duplicate accounts manually in Salesforce lightning go to the account's record page > click the View Duplicates message on the top> choose up to 3 duplicate accounts > click next> choose the master record > choose the surviving values >  click the merge button.

The Salesforce's vanilla merge only works for duplicate accounts / contacts / leads, Salesforce's merge doesn';t offer a mass merge option, you can use ZaapIT’s app to mass merge any objects.