Finding & Merging Duplicates

The same company gets entered into the Contact Book more than once. A teammate types “Acme Corp” on one contract and “Acme Corporation” on the next, an abbreviation creeps in, or AI extraction proposes a party that already exists. Now the same real-world organization is split across several records, and reporting, reuse, and search all fragment.

Merging collapses those records into one. Pactly flags likely duplicates, you pick the record to keep, and every contract that pointed at a duplicate is repointed to the survivor.

Pactly compares contacts by name. For entities it looks for one name appearing inside another (so “Acme” matches “Acme Corporation”); for people it matches on the same first and last name. When it finds a likely match, two things appear in the Contact Book:

• A warning badge next to the contact’s name, with the tooltip “Contact has potential duplicates.”
• A Potential duplicates filter you can switch on to show only contacts that have at least one likely match.

Detection is a suggestion, not a decision. A short name that happens to sit inside an unrelated longer one can surface as a “potential” match, so always confirm the records are genuinely the same party before merging.

Opening a contact runs the duplicate check automatically and lists any matches in its side panel, so you merge from the record you want to keep.

Merging is more than deleting the extra record. When you merge, Pactly:

• Keeps the contact you opened as the survivor, with its details, tags, and verified status intact.
• Fills in any gaps on the survivor from the duplicate. Empty fields and custom attributes take the duplicate’s value. Values already set on the survivor are never overwritten.
• Repoints every contract from the duplicate to the survivor, so contracts that referenced the old record now reference the one you kept.
• Removes the duplicate from the Contact Book.

The contract links are repointed immediately. The cached party names that show in contract details and exports refresh on a background job, so they can take a short while to catch up.

When you try to delete contacts that are still selected in contract properties, Pactly offers a merge option. You can search for the contact to keep even if it is not a suggested duplicate. Merging updates those properties to reference the contact you kept; deleting clears their values. See Delete contacts for the single-contact and bulk flows.

When you upload a third-party contract, Pactly can extract contacts from the document. It checks for existing contacts first. A match appears under AI Extracted Parties for you to confirm with Use Existing Contact, which links the saved contact without creating another record.

When there is no match, the suggestion contains a new, unconfirmed contact. It stays out of the Contact Book until you save it or merge it into an existing contact. Review the details before accepting it, because the suggestion only carries what the AI read from the document.

Dismissing a suggestion removes it from that contract. It does not delete an existing contact from the Contact Book. Previously accepted duplicates still need the normal merge process described above.

For how extracted parties are confirmed and attached, see Adding Parties to a Contract.

The cleanest fix is to not create the duplicate in the first place. When adding a party to a contract, search the Contact Book and pick the existing record instead of typing a new one. Reusing one clean record per real-world party is what keeps reporting and search reliable. See Adding Parties to a Contract for the search-and-reuse flow.

• Contact Book
• Managing Companies & People
• Adding Parties to a Contract
• Party Attributes
• Data Exports