Salesforce Duplicate Management vs. Duplicate Check?
Salesforce administrators dealing with duplicate records were always appointed to the Salesforce AppExchange to find a third-party application to deal with their duplicate data.
Not so long ago, Salesforce started rolling out new features to help Salesforce administrators coping with duplicate records. We’re getting more questions each day about what Salesforce Duplicate Management offers exactly, and if there is still a need for a more extensive third-party application like Duplicate Check. In this article, I’d like to talk about what native Salesforce has to offer, so you can decide yourself if the available features are sufficient for your organization.
Duplicate prevention
Salesforce developed a duplicate prevention feature, primarily used when users insert a record manually. By configuring duplicate prevention, you can set ‘matching rules’ to determine what a duplicate record is, which then alerts the users, or blocks the insert when entering a duplicate record. The matching rules are simple and cannot take into account custom fields. Salesforce's duplicate prevention also works on imports or records created via the API but is then only able to do a hard block when a duplicate is identified, which is not ideal and could lead to potential information loss. Let me share some facts.
| Salesforce | Duplicate Check | |||
| Supports all Objects, also Custom Objects. | Supports all Objects, also Custom Objects. | |||
| Duplicate Jobs only Available in Performance and Unlimited edition of Salesforce | Duplicate Jobs available in all Salesforce editions | |||
| Can not merge records in a Custom Object. | Is able to merge records in a Custom Object. | |||
| Duplicate Jobs may fail on large data sets, and running a job takes a long time | Duplicate Jobs is designed to work with large data sets and has no limits. Also has the ability to run Duplicate Jobs on your local machine to acquire results fast | |||
| Not able to run cross-object jobs. Can't run a job based on a filter. | Match any Object with any Object. Able to apply multiple filters to your job. |
Processing Duplicate Records
After finding your duplicate records, you will get to the last step in a deduplication process – processing the results. First, you establish that the duplicate pair is really a duplicate, after which you can merge or convert the duplicate pair. In Salesforce, duplicates are defined in ‘duplicate record-sets.’ To merge them, users have to open a duplicate record-set and click ‘compare and merge.’ This brings you to an overview page where the user can execute the merge. If you’re only dealing with a few dozen duplicates, this is fine, but if you’re dealing with more than that, you will quickly notice the processing options of native Salesforce are not great since there is no option to process any duplicate records automatically.
| Salesforce | Duplicate Check | |
| Processing duplicate records only manually | Automatic processing options, bound to extensive configuration options | |
| Not possible to convert records since there is no way to run a cross-object job | Automatic convert options after running a cross-object job, bound to extensive configuration options |
Conclusion
Salesforce made a start to implement features for duplicate management in Salesforce and has a fine tool for simple duplicate prevention needs. The duplicate job tool is basic and isn’t capable of doing a few essential things like automatically processing results or running a cross-object job. On top of that, it’s only available in the Unlimited and Performance edition of Salesforce. If you’re looking to get serious about tackling your duplicate records, you can use the Salesforce tools to get started, but eventually, it will probably be insufficient concerning configuration options and processing duplicate records. Experience the difference between the Salesforce tools and Duplicate Check by installing our free version from the App exchange.
