Choose what counts as a duplicate

Duplicate grouping only helps if it matches how your market is actually organised. The Duplicate handling page under Settings is where you decide what counts as the same company, see the rules used for people, and re-check the records you already have when those rules change. Use it once when you set the workspace up, and again whenever an import or a new CRM connection brings in records that group the wrong way.

The page has two tabs, Accounts and Contacts, and the header reads “Decide what counts as a duplicate in your workspace and keep existing duplicates up to date.”

Before you start

Open Settings and choose the Duplicate handling card. The card and the page are only there for roles with the Managing pending & duplicates permission - see Roles and access. With view-only access to that area you can read the page, but the toggle and the resync button stay disabled; changing either needs write access.

Deciding the rules is one job and resolving the groups they produce is another. This page is the rules; the groups themselves are worked through on the Resolve duplicate accounts and Resolve duplicate contacts pages.

Accounts: match across domain endings

By default two accounts are treated as the same company only when their web domains match exactly. The Accounts tab carries one setting that widens that: Treat domains with different endings as duplicates. Turn it on and accounts whose domains differ only by the ending are flagged as duplicates and can be merged from Manage duplicates, auto-merge included.

The page shows what that does and does not cover:

example.com, example.de and example.co.uk are duplicates of each other.
shop.example.com and example.com are not duplicates, because the address itself is different, not just the ending.

That second line is the important half. A subdomain is treated as a separate address, so the setting folds together one company’s per-country sites without also folding in its regional portals, shops, or product sites.

Turn this on when you sell to international groups that run a website per country: the German and the British arm of the same buyer arrive from your CRM and from your imports as separate records, and grouping them is what stops two reps working the same account from either end. Leave it off when your market has genuinely separate businesses on matching names in different countries, where folding them together would hide a real account rather than clean one up.

After you switch it, the tab reminds you that the change is not retroactive: “New accounts follow this setting right away. Accounts you already have are regrouped when you resync duplicates below.” Until the resync runs, a banner reads “Setting saved. Resync duplicates to apply it to the accounts you already have.”

Contacts: the rules are fixed

The Contacts tab has no setting to change. It shows the rules the workspace uses, under How contacts are matched, so you can tell why two people were grouped: contacts are flagged as duplicates when they share any of

the same LinkedIn profile,
the same email address, or
the same first and last name on the same account.

The name rule is deliberately scoped to one account, so two different people with a common name at two different companies are never grouped, while the same person imported twice under one account is.

Resync duplicates

Both tabs carry a Resync duplicates card. It checks every existing account (or contact) again with the current rules and rebuilds your duplicate groups. Use it after you change the domain-endings setting, after a large import, and after a first CRM connection, when groups formed before the records were complete.

Choose Resync duplicates on the tab you want to re-check. Accounts and contacts are resynced separately.
The button reads Resyncing while the run is in flight, and an information banner says the resync is in progress, that it usually takes a few minutes, and that you will get a notification when it is done. You can keep working; your existing groups stay listed while it runs.
When it finishes you get a notification, and the card reports when it last ran and what it found, for example “Last resynced 5 minutes ago - 12 account duplicate groups found.” Review them on the Manage duplicates page the card links to. When nothing matched, it says so plainly instead.
If the run does not complete, the card shows “The last resync didn’t finish. Please try again.” Starting it again is safe.

A resync is a re-check, not a merge: it only decides which records belong in a group, and every merge decision stays yours on the Manage duplicates page.

Only one of these can run at a time per record type. If a resync is already going, or an auto-merge of accounts is still running, the page says so and asks you to start it once that finishes, rather than queueing a second pass over the same records.

What happens next

New records are grouped by the current rules as they arrive, so day-to-day work needs nothing from this page. The completed-resync notification links straight to the duplicates list for that record type; a failed one links back here so you can retry. See Manage notifications.

Settings here are per workspace, not per person: what you change applies to everyone, which is what makes the duplicates list something a team can work through together.

Eva: this page owns “what counts as a duplicate” and “re-check my existing duplicates”. The Accounts tab has exactly one setting, off by default, that makes domains differing only by their ending group together (example.com with example.de and example.co.uk); subdomains stay distinct records, so shop.example.com is never folded into example.com by it. It is not retroactive - new records follow it immediately, existing ones only after a resync. The Contacts tab is read-only: the three fixed match rules are same LinkedIn profile, same email address, and same first and last name on the same account. A resync never merges anything, it only rebuilds the groups, and the previous groups stay visible while it runs. Only one resync per record type at a time, and an account resync also waits for a running auto-merge. Both surfaces need the Managing pending & duplicates permission to change, and view-only members see the page with the controls disabled. When a customer asks why two obvious duplicates are not grouped, the first two questions are whether both records have a resolved domain at all and whether the domain-endings setting is on.