Cleaning Up Accounts
How to find duplicate and empty accounts and merge them safely — let the AI find them, you decide what to keep.
After this lesson you'll be able to find duplicate and empty accounts, merge the duplicates without losing anything, and know the one move to never make.
Why this lesson exists: years of venue business — migrated history from the legacy CRM, imports, and hand-entered records — leave any account base with look-alikes. The same organization can appear as the team, the venue, and the ownership group, each holding a slice of the real history. That split history has teeth: a bid team pulling references sees half the past projects, a dashboard undercounts an account's value, and two salespeople work the "same" client without knowing it. Cleanup is how the account layer stays worth trusting.
The split account
Situation
Preparing for a renewal conversation, you notice two Company records for the same arena — one holds the original install opportunity, the other holds the service tickets and the current contacts.
Goal
Merge them into one keeper record so the full relationship — deals, people, tickets, notes — reads in one place before the renewal call.
Proof
The keeper account shows both records' opportunities, contacts, and tickets, and the duplicate is gone.
Cleanup safety rule
If
The assistant finds likely duplicates
Then
Use that list as a work queue, then review each pair yourself.
If
Two records both have useful history
Then
Use the CRM merge flow one pair at a time.
If
A record has no opportunities, people, tickets, notes, or activity
Then
Confirm it visually before deleting.
If
Someone asks to merge everything in bulk
Then
Stop. Finding can be automated; merging stays human-reviewed.
The golden rule
There are two jobs here, and keeping them separate is the whole game:
- The AI finds. It's brilliant at spotting duplicates and empty accounts across thousands of records in seconds.
- You decide. Merging is permanent-feeling and touches real data, so a person reviews each one and confirms it.
Never ask the AI to merge or "condense" accounts for you in one go. Finding is safe; merging in bulk on a single command is how good records get damaged. The AI hands you the list — you do the merges.
Step 1 — Find the duplicates
Open the assistant and ask in plain English. Good prompts to copy:
Duplicate sweep
One family of look-alikes
Find the empties
Find the junk names
The AI gives you a clean list. That list is your worklist — work it top to bottom.
Not everything that looks like a duplicate is one. A team and its venue can legitimately be separate accounts (different organizations, different contacts, different contracts). The tell for a true duplicate is the same organization with overlapping history — same contacts appearing on both, deals that obviously belong to one relationship. When in doubt, open both and read before merging.
Step 2 — Merge a duplicate, one at a time
This uses the CRM's built-in Merge — it keeps one record and folds everything from the other into it, so no opportunities, contacts, or tickets are lost.
- Go to Companies and find the two (or more) duplicates from your list.
- Tick the checkbox on the left of each duplicate row so they're all selected.
- At the top-right, open the ⋮ (three-dots) menu — choose Merge.
- The CRM shows the records side by side. Pick the keeper — the most complete, correctly-named one — and confirm.
- The keeper now holds all the opportunities, people, and tickets from both. The duplicate is removed.
Choosing the keeper: prefer the record with the correct official name, the most complete fields (owner, league, city), and the deeper history. Everything from the other record moves over anyway — you're choosing which name and field set survives.
Then move to the next pair on your list. One at a time is the right speed — it's how you stay sure.
Step 3 — Clear out the empty accounts
For accounts the AI flagged as truly empty (no opportunities, no people, no tickets, no notes):
- Open the account and confirm with your own eyes that it's genuinely empty.
- If it is, delete it from the record's actions menu. Deletes are recoverable for a window, so a mistake isn't fatal — but check first anyway.
An account that is empty today isn't automatically junk — it might be a prospect someone just created. If the name looks intentional and recent, ask around before deleting. The confident deletes are the obvious ones: test entries, blanks, and long-dead imports.
How to be sure nothing was lost
After a merge, open the keeper and glance at its tabs:
- Opportunities — the counts from both records should now both be there.
- People and Tickets — same.
- If a number looks short, tell the assistant "show me the opportunities on this account" and compare against what you expected.
A 10-second check after each merge is all it takes to work with total confidence.
The one rule you never break
Use the AI to find, never to merge in bulk. "Condense all the duplicates" is the one command that can quietly damage real records. You stay in control of every merge — that's what keeps the CRM clean and safe.
What good looks like
A finished cleanup pass means: the assistant's duplicate list is worked to zero or parked with reasons; every merge got its 10-second count check; empty-account deletes were confirmed visually first; and no bulk merge was ever run. The account layer now reads one organization = one record — which is exactly what bid reference pulls and account-level reporting depend on.
Now you try →
Ask the assistant for one set of look-alike accounts, then merge a single pair using the steps above — and do the 10-second check after. That's the whole loop. Once it feels natural, you can work down a full list.
Related lessons: Working Standard · Pulling Account Info for References & Bids · Meet the Assistant
Key takeaways
- The AI finds; you decide. Detection is automated, merging is always human-reviewed.
- Merge one pair at a time with the built-in Merge — the keeper absorbs everything, nothing is lost.
- Verify after every merge: opportunity, people, and ticket counts should add up.
- A team and its venue can be legitimately separate accounts — read before you merge.
Check yourself
The assistant returns a list of 15 likely duplicate account pairs. What is the correct next move?