Fixing duplicate clients and pets

Sidebar: Clients.

There is no merge button. Alaga cannot combine two client records into one, and nothing in this article does that. What you can do is move the pets onto the record you want to keep and retire the other one — which gets you a single working record going forward, while leaving past invoices and appointments where they were.

Read that limitation before you start, because it decides which record you keep.

Where duplicates come from

A client books online using a different email address or spelling than the one you have.
A client signs up for the portal themselves instead of using your invitation.
Two staff members add the same walk-in within a few minutes of each other.
An import brought in records that already existed.

Decide which record to keep

Keep the record with the most history — the one carrying past appointments, reservations and paid invoices. Those cannot be moved, so whichever record holds them will always be the one your reports and revenue history refer to.

If one record has the history and the other has the portal login, keep the one with the history. A fresh invitation is easy to send; history cannot be rebuilt.

Move the pets across

Open Pets and find the pet attached to the record you are retiring.
Edit the pet and change its owner to the client you are keeping.
Repeat for each pet.

The pet keeps everything attached to it — vaccinations, notes, documents, photos and its own appointment history.

Retire the leftover record

Once its pets are gone, get the empty record out of the way.

Try deleting it from Clients. Two things can stop you:

The client has paid invoices. Alaga refuses, because deleting would take the financial records with it. This is intentional — do not look for a way around it. Leave the record in place instead.
You do not have permission. Deleting clients is limited to managers and owners.

When you cannot delete, make the duplicate obviously dead instead: clear its phone and email so it cannot receive anything, and put something like "DUPLICATE — see [correct name]" in the name or notes so nobody books into it again.

What does not move

Be clear with yourself about this before you start:

Past appointments and reservations stay on the record they were booked under.
Invoices and payments stay where they were raised. Revenue reporting is unaffected by any of this — which is the point of not deleting them.
Portal access belongs to the record the client accepted their invitation under. If you retire that record, send a fresh invitation from the one you kept.

Stopping it happening again

Search before adding. The Clients search matches on name, email and phone — check the phone number, since that is the field clients type consistently.
Send portal invitations from the client's record rather than letting clients sign up cold. An invited client is attached to the record you already have.
After an import, sort the client list by name and scan for near-identical rows while the list is still small.