Importing and deduplicating masters
Getting your company, contact, lead, vendor and item masters clean - importing, then finding and merging duplicates.
- Audience
- Administrators, CRM users, Procurement users
- Permissions needed
- Master data governance, CRM access
- Prerequisites
- Organization setup, Roles & permissions
- Environment
- Production and staging
- Product version
- Current
- Last reviewed
- Owner
- Propulsive Product Team
Before you start
- Merging is permanent once confirmed - read the impact preview before you merge.
Master records - companies, contacts, leads, vendors and items - are the shared foundation every module reads. Importing them once and keeping them clean is the highest-leverage thing a data steward can do.
Importing
Master data is imported in the module that owns it (CRM for companies/contacts/leads, Procurement for vendors, Inventory for items), using that module’s import or bulk-create path. There is no single “import everything” button, because each master carries its own required fields and validation - a vendor needs a GSTIN or PAN where the country requires it, an item needs a unit of measure, and so on.
After import, watch the Master Data Governance score for each domain. The score is always read alongside the record count: 50% of four records and 50% of forty thousand are very different situations, so the count is never hidden. A domain with no records shows “No records” rather than a misleading 100%.
Finding duplicates
The duplicate stewardship screen groups records that deterministic matching on normalised email and phone numbers thinks may be the same person or company. Groups are suggestions, not decisions - nothing is ever merged automatically. A shared office phone or a recycled mobile number is a real cause of false matches, so matching phone numbers alone is never sufficient grounds to merge.
Merging
For each duplicate group you confirm, you:
- Read the impact preview - how many other records point at each duplicate. That count is usually what tells you which record should survive.
- Choose the winning value per field, not just per record - the survivor can keep its own name while taking a better phone number from the record being merged away.
- Confirm the merge. Nothing is deleted: the merged record stays, flagged as merged, and every reference is repointed - which is what makes the merge reversible from the history tab.
Reverting restores the survivor’s original field values and repoints exactly the documents the merge touched.
The non-negotiable part
Some fields carry legal meaning - tax identifiers, legal names. Those use steward-only survivorship: no automatic rule will ever pick a winner for them, and the panel says so explicitly when a merge is unavailable for that entity type.