Search for Duplicate Contacts in Navision

Control on creating new contact card is not as tight as Customer Card and Vendor Card. Usually, sales people are allowed to enter contact's information and not much checking is required before creating the contact. Thus, there are chances that the same contact will be entered more than once in the system. Luckily, Navision has functions for you to find duplicate Contacts in the system, either manually or automatically. To manually search duplicate contacts:
1) Click on Sales & Marketing --> Marketing --> Periodic Activities --> Duplicates --> Generate Duplicate Search string.
2) Key in your filtering criteria.
3) Click on the OK button to let Navision search for the duplicate contacts.

After finish generating the duplicate contacts, Navision will close the Generate Dupl. Search String report. The duplicate results won't show here.

To view the Duplicate Contacts result, click on Sales & Marketing --> Marketing --> Periodic Activities --> Duplicates --> Duplicate Contacts to open the Contact Duplicates window. If the 2 different contacts are shown as duplicates in the Duplicate Contacts window, you can tick on the Seperate Contact field to indicate these are different contacts. Once you tick the contacts as different contacts, Navision will not list the contacts in Duplicate contacts windows again in future search.



If you do not want the hassle to search the duplicates manually, you can set Navision to automatically update the duplicate contacts information whenever the contact is updated. The Auto mode can be defined at Sales & Marketing --> Setup --> Marketing Setup.

Contact Search

What is the best way to search a contact in Navision database ? You can open the Contact card and then use the field filter to filter the contact that meet your criteria. This is the standard way of finding record in Navision. However, for Contact, Navision has a better function for you, called Contact Search.

Open the Contact Card and then click on Function --> Contact Search. Type a searching criteria in the Find What field and then click on the Find button. Navision will search the following fields in Contact table: Name, Search Name, Name 2, Address, Address 2, City, Phone No., Telex No., Fax No. Telex Answer Back, VAT Registration No., Post Code, County, E-Mail, Home Page, Company Name, Mobile Phone No. and Pager.

Besides Contact table, Navision will also search:
1) Comment field in Rlshp. Mgt. Comment Line table.
2) Description and Subject field in Interaction Log Entry table.
3) Description table in To-do table.
4) Description in Opportunity table.

So, do you agree with me that this Search Contact function is much better than the field filter method? Not only that, Seach Contact function also has the fuzzy logic algorithm to return search result based on close spelling and pronounciation.

However, in order for the Search Contact function to work, you need to index the contact information first before it can be searched. You can let Navision automatically update the index each time you modify the contact's information by Setting the Search Index Mode field in the Marketing setup to Auto. If you set the Search Index Mode to manual, you need to run the Generate Contact Search Index periodically. The Generate Contact Search Index can be located at Sales & Marketing --> Marketing --> Periodic Activities --> Generate Contact Search Index.
The Contact Search can also be accessed from Sales & Marketing --> Marketing --> Contact Search.