Contacts waiting in Manage pending (duplicates and account conflicts)

When the Contact Finder agent finds new people, some of them are held for your review instead of being added straight to your accounts. They sit on the Manage pending contacts page until you approve or dismiss them. This page explains why a contact lands there and how to clear it.

This is something only editing users handle. If you are signed in with a read-only seat, you will not see the Manage pending entry on the Contacts page.

Symptom

On the Contacts page, the Manage pending button shows a count above zero, for example Manage pending (12). Opening it lands you on Manage pending contacts, which has two tabs:

Contact finder - contacts whose email already exists on another contact in your workspace. The banner reads We found a duplicate contact.
Account approval needed - contacts whose company matched more than one of your accounts, so the workspace could not decide which account to attach them to. The banner reads We could not tell which account to use.

Each tab carries its own count next to the tab label. A new pending contact also raises a notification in the bell menu that links straight to the right tab.

Why this happens

The workspace holds a found contact for review for one of two reasons.

Duplicate (the Contact finder tab). The Contact Finder agent searched for new contacts for your accounts and found people whose email address already matches a contact that lives on a different account in your workspace. Rather than create a second copy or silently move the existing contact, the workspace pauses the new one so you can decide.

Account match (the Account approval needed tab). The contact was captured while browsing LinkedIn or added manually, and the company name matched several accounts in your workspace at once. Because there was no single obvious account to attach it to, the workspace paused it and asks you to pick the right account. The suggested best match is the account that already has the most contacts.

Until you act, a pending contact is not a live contact: it does not show on its account, in the main Contacts list, or in exports, and it does not sync to your connected source.

How to fix it

Clear duplicates (Contact finder tab)

Open the Contacts page and select Manage pending, then stay on the Contact finder tab.
Review each row to decide whether the found person is genuinely new or is the same person you already have.
To keep a contact, select it (use the row checkboxes to pick several at once) and choose Approve. Confirm in the Approve pending contacts dialog, which shows how many contacts you selected. Approving turns the found contact into a live contact on its assigned account.
To drop the unwanted copies, select them and choose Dismiss. The Dismiss pending contacts dialog asks you to confirm; dismissing removes the pending contacts and leaves the existing accounts and contacts untouched.

Clear account conflicts (Account approval needed tab)

From Manage pending contacts, open the Account approval needed tab.
To handle one contact, select Choose account on its row. A dialog opens for choosing which account the contact should be added to; it lists the accounts the company matched. Pick one and choose Update to attach the contact and make it live.
To handle several contacts at once and accept the suggested account for each, select the rows and choose Add to best match. Confirm in the dialog. Each contact is added to the account it is currently matched against.
To discard contacts you do not want, select them and choose Dismiss, then confirm. The matched accounts are left untouched.

You can mix individual and bulk handling on either tab: use Choose account or per-row review when a contact needs judgment, and the bulk Approve, Add to best match, or Dismiss actions when a batch can be cleared in one pass. Use the Search for contact box at the top of either table to find a specific person.

When a tab reaches zero, that queue is clear and the Manage pending count on the Contacts page drops accordingly.