When a person logs in to register, join a group, complete a form, or give at Bayside, Planning Center looks for the exact match of first name, last name, and email or phone. If any one of these fields doesn't match, People creates a new profile. So if Elizabeth signs in as Beth, or uses a different email or phone number, any of these could cause a new profile to be created instead of updating the current one. You might see something like this:
These are obviously the same person, and the duplicate needs to be merged. Just go to the staff portal and use the support widget in the bottom right corner to report the duplicate. Be sure to set the request type to Planning Center and ask that a duplicate for Anne Teahan be merged.
Please include the profile URLs for all profiles.
Sometimes there are discrepancies between the two profiles, like this:
For this duplicate, one profile has Teahan as the last name and the other has Teahan-King. Since you are connecting with or ministering to this person, please be sure to include which name (or email, or phone) is the correct one when there are differences. The request might say, "Please merge the duplicate for Anne Teahan. The hyphenated name was a mistake."
We do want to clean up duplicates. They cause confusion when an attendee is trying to check in or when a staff member is trying to schedule a volunteer. When you are looking for a submitted form or checking out the individual's activity, it is confusing because the form you want might be on one profile and attendance and serving activity on the other.
Watch out for names that appear to be duplicates, but aren't, like a son who has the same name as his father or two Susie Smiths with completely different birth dates and different contact information. With over 100,000 people in our database, there are unique people who have the same name. When you do have a chance to include a middle initial or name, a suffix like Jr., or a birth date, it really helps to distinguish between people with like names.