How to deal with Duplicates
No matter what checks are in place within a system there will always be duplicate data created at some point. This article is designed to help you understand what you should look out for when dealing with duplicate records.
The Huume system has a number of checks in place to stop duplicates being created but customers may unwittingly bypass these and still succeed in creating more than one record. The checks are:
- Public portal account - customers can only create one public portal account with their email address
- My profile check - if a Person already exists in the system that matches the details entered on the My Profile form then they are stopped progressing any further and displayed a message that there is an issue with their account
How do I know if duplicates have been created?
The system tracks the number of duplicate records a Person has in the system through the Duplicates field. If this field has a value greater than 0 then a Person has other similar records in the system.
When viewing a record with potential duplicates a banner is displayed at the top of the page to highlight that some exist.
The records that have been identified as potential duplicates are then listed in a section at the bottom of the page.
How do I clear duplicates?
A record will continue to be flagged as a duplicate until the duplicates have been marked as resolved. This is done by checking the box against the relevant record and then clicking the Mark as resolved button.
This will not remove the duplicate records, it just tells the system to ignore them going as you have already made the relevant changes
How do I know what changes to make?
You want to get to the position of having one Active Person record that is connected to the other relevant household members, and where applicable this Person is connected to a Public portal account using the correct email address.
The exact changes that you will need to make to clear up any duplicate records with vary depending on the number of duplicate records and what cases they are connected to.
However, if you follow these steps it should help you work out what changes you need to make:
- Make a note of what duplicate Person , Case and application records exist
- Determine what Person record has the Public portal account, if there is one, connected to it
- If a customer has created more than one public portal account find out which email address they wish to use going forwards
- If there are duplicate Cases involved determine which one you want to use going forwards. Note - Housing Register applications cannot be moved from one case to another but Homeless applications can. This means that the Case containing the Housing Register application is normally the case that is kept, while any others are set to be Archived
Once you have identified which records you want to keep you can then work through the duplicates and Archive the others. When doing this you should process the changes in the following order:
- If duplicate Cases with Housing Register on one and a Homeless on another, move the Homeless application to the Housing Register case
- Update the original Homeless case and set a Date left case for each Household member to be the date they joined the case
- Set any case strands on the Case to be Archived
- Set the case state to be Archived
- For each duplicate Household member mark their duplicates as resolved and set their state to be Archived
If the customer has a public portal account it is important that is connected to the right Person record, and not one you have Archived. To change the Person that a Public portal account is connected to you need to follow these steps:
- Go to the Public portal accounts list
- Search for the email address that the customer wishes to use going forwards
- Click the Unlink button to remove the connection to Archived person record
- Click the Link button to then re-link the account to the right person record
- Ensure the Person record you have linked the Public portal account to has the correct email address set in their Comms preferences
These steps should help you in dealing with any duplicates and provide you with a high level process to follow to identify what chnages you need to make to resolve any duplicates.
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