Join To Party
An individual may end up with a duplicate record in Compass if they were added twice, added as a contact, or added with a similar but not the same name.
The "Join to Party" button allows individuals' records to be merged in the event of duplicates. You must determine beforehand which one survives and is overridden, then archived. Cleanup can occasionally be needed, in the case of the "Member Status" of the Archived record being replaced by the Survivor (if there's a difference in status).
To merge a record you will want to locate the account you want to keep first. This is the surviving record. From the surviving record, click "Join to Party" in the top right of their Summary >Snapshot page. A new box will populate to search for the record you want to archive. Choose the profile to archive and confirm.
Once confirmed, the two accounts will be merged. Click the refresh button in the browser to update the data for the individual.
Notes before merging:
If a data field on the surviving record is null but that same field is not null on the losing record, the data from the losing record will pull through to the resultant record.
If both records have an OmegaFi Billing Tab, then they have two separate accounts, and they cannot be merged using this feature. Contact OmegaFi to merge the member's Vault records, if you would like only one account to display. OmegaFi has fail-safes to correct merging mistakes, but please ensure to look for those Billing Tabs!
If the account is archived, the Billing Status will read Inactive/Archived (archived will be in red)
Things to review after merging:
- Profile > Statuses
- Change Log (if Revert is necessary on any contact info)
- Relationships
If there is a relationship on one record that does not match a relationship on the other, that one will pull through to the new party, even if it stems from the Archived. Ex. if the Survivor has a member relationship to Tau and the Archived record has a contact relationship to Gamma, the new party will have both relationships.
There should only be one Member relationship on an individual record. In the case of transfer members, there are normally two member relationships that end up on the de-duped party. In this case, the relationship to the "Initiated" Chapter needs to be "end dated", so that the only active member relationship is the currently affiliated Chapter.
Join to Party (merging) vs. deleting a record – It's best practice to merge a duplicate member record so all historical data of both records are kept, but there are times when deleting one may also be appropriate. For example, groups that have an LMS integrated with Initiation Reporting, course completion data has a chance of being lost during merging, and courses would have to be redone. In these cases, it’s also best to take screenshots of or download any member information and documents and update their Status History to include that from the deleted record.