Introduction
Maintaining good data hygiene is a crucial element when dealing with large amounts of data and ensuring that you do not have duplicate records is a big part of having clean data. Duplicate Households can be created through importing contact information, form submissions, and manual data entry. In order to reduce the number of duplicate households in the database, you can de-dupe by merging matching households through CharityEngine's De-Dupe tool.
Instructions
to de-dupe household records, navigate to Automation & Workflow application and under the Contacts Section, click on De-Dupe Households.
When navigating to this screen, you will notice that default filters will be in place to assist in finding any recently created duplicate households, such as the compare mode, date created, and the number of duplicate records
Additional filters can be found under the Advanced Filters, such as Household name, the date range that the organizations were created, when the household was modified, and how many duplicates are in the database.
The compare mode filter allows you to select certain criteria to compare the household 
For example, if Name Only is selected as the criteria, CharityEngine will compare all of the households that have the same name, regardless if they have other information that does not match such as email or address.
Selecting a more specific filter will result in finding households that closer match, but still may have differing information. For example, if the compare mode is set to Exact Name and Address, CharityEngine will match the contacts that have all of the criteria selected. As you can see in the below example, the two records have the same name and address, however one record has an email and one record has a phone number.
Once duplicate contacts have been found, check the Merge box for the contacts you want to merge
Once contacts have been selected, you will be able to click on the drop-down and
Select the Master Record from the drop-down that will be used as the contact in the database and click the merge button to merge the contacts. The Master record will be the surrviving record and the other record will be deleted from the database. If the two records have data in a field that differs, the data in the master record will remain. If the deleted record contains data that the master does not contain, the data will be added to the master record.
Note: The contact ID will be in sequential order of when they were entered into the database. Using the example above, the contact ID 227618866 was in the database first and 227618867was entered second.
