Splitting a Person or Company

Before splitting an entity into two or more separate records, it is advisable to use DotAlign's person or company audit tools to explore whether the information should be split vs. kept as one contact. What appears to be a mistake might instead be accurate information (e.g. the person may actually have a nickname you didn't know about).

DotAlign has several ways of smartly deduplicating people and companies, and automatically detecting when new information should be assigned to a preexisting entity vs. when a separate entity should be created.

For example, if two colleagues both have a contact card for a person using the email, "[email protected]," with one saved under the name "Graham Wilde" and the other saved under "Graham Wild," DotAlign will figure out it likely should combine them into one contact even though the surnames don't exactly match.

Of course, this means that the app's smart logic may actually cause DotAlign to fail to keep people or companies separate when that distinction should, in fact, be preserved. For example, if those two Grahams are actually two different people and it was the email that was spelled incorrectly, DotAlign's combining them would be inaccurate and may lead to confusion about why one Graham seems missing. As a result, DotAlign has tools you can use to separate people or companies where the app lacks the evidence to do so automatically.

  1. Review the identifiers associated with the record, and note any that should not be used for merging, e.g. a name that belongs to two or more people
  2. Submit any identifiers that should not be used for merging to the relevant "disqualifiers" endpoint, e.g. POST api/people/disqualify
  3. Review the identity pairs (tuples) associated with the record, and note any in which the first identity and the second identity - while both valid for merging - have incorrectly been paired
  4. Submit the identifiers in any incorrectly-linked tuples to the relevant "split" endpoint, e.g. POSTapi/people/split

Make sure to be comprehensive in your review - sometimes there are multiple paths linking identifiers, and therefore multiple changes that need to be made for a clean split.

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