Duplicate Account Management

For as long as you have run your Food Pantry you have struggled with duplicate accounts littering your database. The major byproduct of duplicate accounts is your clients are able to "work" you into giving out extra food. I imagine you are already aware of this problem and struggle with it constantly. When there is an abundance of resources and you have enough for everyone this isn't as big of an issue and your efforts to control it seem sufficient.

But in todays world of famine it is a different scenario. There are more people coming to you for assistance then ever before and less money and food donations coming in to keep you going. In fact it is likely tight enough that you are faced with turning some people away. Imagine if you could fairly serve everyone and eliminate the loopholes only a select few use to get more than their fair share.

This is where duplicate account management comes in. With this report you can see possible duplicate accounts, view them all and if you determine they are duplicates you can merge them together. This allows you to have a clean database and your computer operators wont have to choose which account to be using this time when that person comes back in.

In this picture of the report you can see that there are two names exactly alike. You can also see what kind of match the system is recognizing, in this case it is a name match. The third column just shows the address of the first name. They may be the same person, they may not be. Each name is a link that you can click on to see their account information. The account information includes visit history, notes, case files, uploaded documents and their personal information. When you click on one of them the system opens a new tab (window) so you can view them without loosing where you are in the report. If you determine that they are the same account you can merge the two together which eliminates the second account. This leaves you with just one account with all of their visit history intact and applied to the right person.