Salestrail Blog of Sales Excellence

How to Merge Accounts in Salesforce: A Complete Guide

Written by Vy Dang | 9/19/19 6:38 AM

Keeping your CRM free from duplicate contacts is an industry best practice - it helps prevent mismatched records, skewed data analytics and lessens your team confusion.

Even better, it means less time spent on administrative tasks and more on actual selling. We - the folks here at Salestrail - are all about sales efficiency, so we’ve created a comprehensive and user-friendly guide on how to merge accounts in Salesforce. Jump to any section.

Salesforce: How to merge accounts 

Merge duplicate accounts in Salesforce classic

Step 1: Go to the Accounts tab and click Merge Accounts in the Tools section. If you can't see it, ask permission from your admin account.

 

Step 2: First enter a search string to find potential duplicate accounts. The list will show accounts that start with your search string.

 

Step 3: Select up to three accounts you want to merge. Then click Next.

Step 4: Here, you need to select one account as the master record and choose the fields that you want to retain from each record.

Fields with conflicting values are highlighted.

 

Step 5: Then click Merge. Easy-peasy, right?

Merge duplicate accounts in Salesforce Lightning Experience

Step 1: With Salesforce Lightning Experience, you need to go to a specific account record. If there are potential duplicates, you can click View Duplicates to see them.

However, it seems only exact same account names are registered as potential duplicates in the Lightning Experience.

If you can't find the duplicates you want to merge, switch to Salesforce classic and use the Merge Accounts tool.

Step 2: Like how we do it with Salesforce classic, you can choose up to three account records to merge. Then click Next.

Screenshot by Salesforce 


Step 3: Similarly, here you need to choose one account record as the master, and choose the field values that you want to keep. Then click Next.

Screenshot by Salesforce 

Step 4: Confirm your choices and merge. And it's done!

Screenshot by Salesforce 

 

Note: You can only merge business accounts or person accounts together. These two can't be mixed. 

Merge accounts with completely different names

At some point, you may need to merge non-duplicate accounts for reasons such as a client changing their name.

There's no one exact way to do it. But here is a simple and effective method we have used when trying to merge non-duplicate accounts.

Step 1: Edit name manually

From your Account Tab, find the old account you would like to merge, for example, Corporate US. Then click edit, add the new name at the beginning like in the screenshot. 

 

After you've done, click Save.

Then go back to Merge Accounts tool, and enter your search string. The returned results will include your edited accounts.

 

Step 2: Then just repeat the steps in merging for duplicate accounts in Salesforce Classic

How to mass merge accounts in Salesforce

Currently, Salesforce only allows users to merge up to 3 accounts at one time. This can be time-consuming if you need to merge lists of thousand contacts.

Using Excel is always possible, if you’re an Excel wizard.

If not, chances are that it’ll take a huge amount of time and effort, without any guaranteed results that do not create additional issues later on.

After having done some shopping around, here’s our selected Salesforce software and apps that’ll help you ease the pain.

Cloudingo

 

 

 

Main features:

  • Bulk action (mass update, mass delete, mass merge)
  • Dedupe import files

Free trial: 10 days

Pricing per user: $1,096 annually

Appexchange rating: 5

Number of reviews: 338

ZaapIT

 

Main features:

  • Mass Clone, Create, Emails, Add to Campaign, convert & Merge leads.
  • Auto scheduled merge 
  • Advanced duplicate detection options

Free trial: 14 days

Pricing per user: $12.49 USD monthly

Appexchange rating: 5

Number of reviews: 70

XLConnector

 

Main feature: Mass updates, inserts, deletes, merges, and Lead conversion

Free trial: 30 days

Pricing per user: $8.25 USD monthly

Appexchange rating: 5

Number of reviews: 160

DupeAlerts

 

Main features:

  • Dupe Detection Upon Entry
  • Mass Merge and Mass Convert
  • Batch Scheduling Features

Free trial: N/A

Pricing: $750 USD annually

Appexchange rating: 4.5

Number of reviews: 72

Interested in more tools, tips and techniques in maximizing the benefits of your CRM?

Read our Guide to Server-side sync for Gmail and Salesforce®.