Move or merge a contact, location or company

Moving and merging

You can use the tools described on this page to:

  • move contacts and locations in the Company List
  • You can move a contact to a different location (which may be in a different company).

    You can move a location to a different company.

  • merge contacts, locations and companies in the Company List
  • You can merge: a contact into another contact at the same company; a location into another location at the same company; or a company into another company.

    The original contact/location/company is deleted.

All the existing case information related to the contact/location you are moving will be reconnected to the new location/company you are moving it to.

Similarly the case information related to the contact/location/company you are merging will be reconnected to the contact/location/company you are merging into.

For example, you move a contact from company A to a location in company B. If they are the Bill To contact for any cases, all the previous invoices they were linked to are now linked to company B, rather than to company A. You may not actually want this to happen. See Important note below for the approach to managing this.

You are clearly advised about the impact of your changes before the system performs these operations. Once you click YES the changes cannot be undone. We recommend that you experiment with this feature on the demo database to become familiar with it before applying it to your live data.

It is also a good idea to:

  • Refresh your understanding of contacts who have a company with no name.
  • Keep an audit record of the changes that you make.

Tip

In the processes below you'll often need to display two particular rows in the Company List at the same time and drag items between them. This is easier to perform if they are displayed close together, which you can achieve with filtering. In the screenshot below it is easy to move Wendy Gillespie from Centrelink to CGU (Sydney office) because the list has been filtered appropriately.

Important note: managing the impact of move operations

As described above, when you have used these tools to move, for example, a contact to a different company, all the historical information related to this contact (such as costs and invoices) will be linked to the new company. Often you do not want this to happen.

You should consider simply creating a new contact record for the same person at the new company. As a result the person's connections in your database will be correctly separated between their work for the two companies. You should make the original contact inactive (un-tick the Contact active box), so that it remains in the system but cannot be selected at cases.

Similarly, when a contact has been moved to a different location, the new location details will apply everywhere this contact is connected to a case. If you do not want this, consider creating a new contact at the new location and similarly making the original one inactive.

See Contacts FAQ for some other scenarios.