Cleaning up duplicates

Both importers skip the obvious duplicates on the way in. Import from CSV skips a row when the first name, last name, and email address all match someone already in Scout. Import from Planning Center checks the PCO id it stored on the first run, then falls back to email and name, so a re-import lands on the records it already created.

What gets past both of them is the same person under a maiden name, a nickname, or a second email address. Scout has a screen for merging those.

Run the scan

Click Find duplicates on the People page. It sits in the top bar beside Import, and it appears on desktop and tablet screens only. On a phone the way in is the dashboard: when Scout has found pairs, What happened this week carries a line like "Found 3 possible duplicates to review" under Scout took care of it, and clicking it opens the same page.

Running the scan and merging both need the Edit person records permission. Admin, Pastor, and Staff have it by default. Volunteer and Finance do not, and for them the page loads with a red bar reading Failed (403) and no pairs. See What each permission controls.

The page says up front what you are about to do: "Review possible duplicate person records. Merging is permanent. The absorbed record is saved to the audit log."

Read the pair before you merge

Every pair carries a confidence chip and the reason Scout put the two records together.

• High confidence: the two records share an email address and a last name. The reason reads Same email and last name. Scout ignores a +tag in the address, so sarah+kids@gmail.com and sarah@gmail.com count as one mailbox.
• Likely match: the two records share a first and last name, plus either a household or a phone number. The reason reads Same name and household or Same name and phone.

High confidence is a strong signal and not a verdict. A husband and wife who share one inbox and one surname land in that tier, and so do a parent and an adult child still on the family email. Read both sides before you merge. Each name on the card is a link that opens that person's full profile in a new tab, which is the quickest way to check. See Reading a person's profile.

Two records with the same name and nothing else in common never surface. In a church of a few thousand, common names on their own produce hundreds of pairs that are mostly different people, and the real matches get lost in them.

The scan covers inactive and archived records as well as active ones, because an archived typo record is exactly the sort of thing worth cleaning up. Any record that isn't active wears its status as a chip beside the name.

Merge or dismiss

Under each person there's a Keep this one button. Click it under the record you want to survive. The other record is absorbed and then deleted.

Not a match sits at the top right of the pair. Scout records the pair and stops offering it. There is no screen for reversing a dismissal, so a pair you dismiss by mistake stays dismissed.

What a merge moves

When you keep one record, what was attached to the other one moves onto it: pastoral notes, group memberships, team memberships, scheduled volunteer slots, donations and recurring gifts, household memberships, tags, saved lists, check-ins, follow-ups, form submissions, event registrations, and workflow enrollments.

Where the record you keep is already on the same team, group, saved list, household, tag, event, or workflow, the duplicate row is dropped instead of doubled.

Empty fields on the surviving record fill in from the absorbed one: email, phone, address, city, state, ZIP, photo, birth date, and gender. Fields that already hold a value are left alone. If a third person in your church already holds the absorbed record's email address, Scout skips that one fill so it doesn't break the one-address-per-person rule.

The earlier joined date wins, so a merge never makes someone look newer to the church than they are. The Added line on the review card shows the joined date when a record has one and the created date when it doesn't, so two records with no joined date leave you with the surviving record's created date.

If both records carry an engagement read, the surviving record keeps its own. Scout re-reads it against the combined history on the next overnight pass.

Scout then deletes the absorbed record outright. There is no archived copy of it left in the app.

When both records have a login

If both people have a Scout sign-in, the merge stops and the red bar reads "Both Persons have linked User accounts. Resolve manually first." Decide which login the person keeps, then remove the other one.

1. 1

   Open the Users tab

   Go to Settings and choose the Users tab.

2. 2

   Edit the login you are letting go

   Click Edit on that person's row.

3. 3

   Remove the user

   Click Remove user, then confirm. Scout asks "Remove [their name] from this church? Their account loses dashboard access."

4. 4

   Go back and merge

   Return to Find duplicates and click Keep this one.

Removing a login deletes it. The person record itself stays where it is. You can't remove yourself, and you can't remove the owner without transferring ownership first. Removing a user needs the Invite users & assign roles permission, which is covered in Inviting your team.

Where only one of the two records has a sign-in, no extra step is needed. The merge moves that login to the surviving record and the person keeps signing in the way they always have.

How often to run it, and what gets logged

Run the scan once after every import, then every month or so. How long a pass takes depends on how many pairs surface. When there's nothing to do, the page reads No duplicates to review, with "Scout didn't find any high-confidence matches. Run this scan again after your next import."

Every merge writes an audit entry that carries a full snapshot of the absorbed record. Find it under Settings on the Audit Log tab. The row reads person.merged in the What column, with the surviving person's id under Target. Admin and Pastor can open that tab by default; Staff cannot.

The snapshot itself doesn't render anywhere on screen. To read what was on the absorbed record, click Export CSV at the top of the Audit Log tab and open the metadata column of the file. That export needs the Export data permission on top of audit log access. Entries are kept for 12 months.