When you have the same person twice

Sarah booked online with her work email in March and rang up in June, when somebody typed her in fresh. Now she has two histories, and neither is right.

Spotting them

Clients → Duplicates → Check for duplicates reads your whole client list and comes back with the pairs worth looking at: two records that share a phone number or an email address and have a matching name. It's deliberately cautious — a mother and daughter on one phone number won't be suggested, because the names don't match.

Nothing runs that check on a schedule, so it finds nothing until you press it. It's worth a minute every few months, and it's the first thing to try when something feels wrong: a regular whose visit count looks too low, a client who says they've been coming for years sitting on one visit. That's usually not a bug, it's a second record.

Each pair shows how many appointments and sales each of the two records carries, which is the number that decides what you do next — see What actually moves below. If a pair isn't really the same person, Not a duplicate takes it off the list for good.

You can still find them by hand, and it's the way to confirm one: type a surname into the client list and read the Email and Phone columns.

Merging them

What actually moves

This is worth knowing before you press it, because the answer is "some of it":

• Tags, the timeline, and their Good to know lines move to the kept record.
• The account balance moves, and both ledgers get a line saying where it went — so the money reconciles from either side.
• Empty fields get filled in. If the kept record has no phone number and the other one does, the kept record gains it. Fields that already have a value are never overwritten.
• Past appointments and sales stay with the archived record — and once it's archived you can't open it again. The visits still sit on your calendar on the days they happened, and the money still counts in your reports, but they stop being part of the kept client's history.