In the financial services world, it is extremely important for wealth managers to keep a clean database. This means identifying and handling duplicate households and Individuals. There are a number of tools that are available to handle duplicates and we will walk you through their strengths and weaknesses.
Native to salesforce lightning is a duplicate record checking tool that is interactive with the user as they’re adding or editing records. If a record is a potential duplicate based upon rules that you define, it will notify that user of the potential duplicate and ask how the user would like to handle it. While this is an intuitive tool and works very well, there are two significant limitations to it. First, it will only allow you to look for individual records and does not handle duplicates in mass. Salesforce lightning also does not have any analytics to report on and requires permissions like deletion which you may not want to grant to your users for obvious reasons.
Another available application that I have used on numerous occasions is Demandtools. This application will allow you to define fairly sophisticated rules to look for duplicates across the entire database and handle them in mass. In addition to that, you could have very strict rules and then run subsequent passes with looser rules until you’ve exhausted the entire database looking for duplicates. Demandtools will also allow you to export a list of those duplicates to an excel file that you can review before handling the duplicate. There are some downsides to this app as well. First, it really should only be run by a system administrator who knows what they’re doing and understands the repercussions of merging records. It is also a very comprehensive app which makes it not so intuitive and requires some training. Finally, it requires an annual subscription.
At Mosaik, we have significant experience in this area and would be happy to advise you on how to address in implement a solution for handling a duplicate problem.
