Hello everyone!
There was a question asked that I do not know the answer to and was hoping someone can help, please?
"Has anyone ever found that patrons have seemingly been erased from the database - to find later they’ve been merged curiously into another patron? and by curiously - I mean someone merged into a name completely different (ie: Frank Smith merged into William Jones, kind of thing…)
or any larger groups of merges - unexplainable… ?"
Thank you!
Patron merging can be a dangerous business. TM does provide thorough audit records though so you can try and figure out what happened. Go to the Patron’s “Tran” tab, change the search parameters to transaction code, then select “Patron Merged” to see an audit record of that patron’s merging. (“Patron Merged to Household” is a different transaction code FYI.) Here’s a screenshot if that helps:
It’s possible to use the Find Duplicates feature, set up unsafe/un-conservative matching fields and set it up for automatic merging. As someone who has done this before, it’s not pretty. In general, you should never use the automatic merge option. Over here at Proctors, we also like to have a buddy system for using the Find Duplicates feature - multiple eyes/brains helps reduce sloppy errors. More likely, it’s a one-off bad manual merge. It’s easy to not pay attention and move too quickly.
