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Sooner or later a contact needs to do something only a member can do. Two buttons look like they will handle it, and a third route needs no button at all: the person registers themselves. Merge Records is the only one that shows you what it is about to do, and the only one that always combines the two records. Built for organisations whose donors, subscribers and ticket buyers eventually join. Replaces retyping a contact’s details into a new profile and losing everything that was attached to the old record.

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When a contact needs to become a member

A contact is a person record without a login. Convert one when the person now has to:
  • sign in to the member area
  • hold a membership fee, renew it, and appear in fee reports
  • belong to a chapter, a group or a unit
  • take a course
  • vote in an e-voting session
  • hold a role or a permission
Everything else, a contact can already do: buy a ticket, donate, receive the newsletter, sign an e-document, pay an invoice, hold a recurring subscription. The side-by-side comparison of what each one can do is on Contacts. If nothing in the list above applies, leave them as a contact.

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Merge is the conversion

Merge Records folds the contact into the member you keep. It moves the contact’s history onto the member record, then deletes the contact. The contact is the source, the record that goes away. The member is the target, the record you keep. The page labels them that way.
1

Find the pair

Duplicate Suggestions at the bottom of the page has a Contact-User Matches tab: a contact and a member sharing an email address, scored 95%. That is the usual starting point. If you already know the two records, use Manual Merge at the top and search each side by name or email.
2

Read the preview

The comparison puts the two records side by side, one row per field. Fields that agree are ticked. Fields that disagree are tagged Conflict with a pair of radio buttons, and Orgo preselects a suggestion. Read the email and phone rows even so. Underneath, Related Records to Transfer counts the main things that will move (registrations, payments, subscriptions, invoices, files and so on).
3

Confirm

Everything runs in one transaction. If any part of it fails, nothing changes.
4

Check the survivor

Open the member profile and confirm the payments, tickets and tags landed. The chapter does not move, so if the two records sat in different chapters, check the Roles tab.
A merge can be undone once, within 30 days, from Merge History at the top right of the page. After that the Undo button reads Expired and the merge is permanent. Undo recreates the deleted contact, with a new id.
The full mechanics, including member-to-member merges, are on Merging Duplicates.

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What transfers and what does not

Read this before you merge, not after. The same rules apply whichever way the merge happens: by hand on the Merge Records page, through Create user account, or automatically when the person registers (both described below). Some rows tied to the contact do not move. They go with the contact and are not restored by undo:
  • Push notification registrations (the member’s app registers again on next sign-in)
  • Event App bookmarks, speaker entries and 1:1 meetings
  • Feed posts, mentions and reactions made as the contact
  • Poll votes cast as an external attendee
  • Temporary document access links
  • Scheduled and past workflow runs for the contact
A merge you run yourself, by hand or through Create user account, carries on regardless of that list, and nothing in the preview warns you. If the contact took part in an event as a speaker or networked in the Event App, check what you are about to lose. The automatic merges described below do the opposite: they leave the contact alone when it holds any of these.
If your organisation has Donations count towards membership switched on, a merge re-judges the member’s membership after the contact’s donations arrive. See Donations.

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Before you merge

  • Both records are the same person, confirmed on more than a shared name. Compare email, phone and town, and open each record if you are unsure.
  • You know which of the two records holds the payment history, so you can confirm afterwards that it moved.
  • You have decided which email address the person keeps. The survivor signs in with it, and their username is regenerated from it.
  • The contact has no Event App history you need to keep (see the list above).

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Create user account is not the merge screen

Create user account, on the contact record and in the contact list row menu, registers a new member from that contact’s email and sends the welcome message. It never opens the comparison: there is no preview and no field-by-field choice. When it finishes you land on the new member’s profile. What happens to the contact afterwards is decided by Settings → Modules → Users & Profiles → Configuration → Default Status for Admin-Created Users, not by anything the button asks you:
Because the outcome hangs on a setting rather than on the button, do not use Create user account when the contact has payments or tickets worth keeping and you have not checked that setting. Merge Records shows you what will move before you commit. If you already pressed Create user account, search Contacts for that email straight away. If the contact is still listed, merge it into the new member and the history follows. If it is gone, the fold already happened and Merge History has the undo.
Registering a member from scratch, and what the welcome email contains, is covered in Adding Members.

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When someone registers with the email of an existing contact

Nobody has to press anything. A contact who signs up as a member is folded into their new account automatically, once Orgo has proof that the address is theirs:
  • Self-signup: the merge happens when the person confirms their email address with the code Orgo sends. Until then nothing moves, so someone who registers with a stranger’s address cannot pick up that contact’s payments or tickets.
  • Invitation links (member or company invitations) and social sign-in (Google, Microsoft and the like): the address is already proven, so the merge happens straight away.
The rules are the ones in the table above, with one difference: what the person typed when they registered wins. The contact only fills fields they left blank. These automatic merges do not depend on the Merge Profiles toggle. The result is written to Merge History under the new member’s own name, and the member sees their earlier tickets, payments and e-documents on their profile.
An automatic merge is skipped when it would lose something. If the contact holds any of the rows listed under “do not move” (Event App bookmarks, speaker entries, 1:1 meetings, feed posts, external poll votes, temporary document access links or workflow runs), the contact is left in place and the person exists twice: one member, one contact with the same email. Merge the pair yourself from Merge Records once you have decided what you can afford to lose.
Signing up does not touch a contact on a different email address. A person who bought tickets as work@example.org and registers as home@example.org ends up with two records until you merge them.

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What merge refuses to do

A member cannot be merged into a contact. Pick that direction and the page tells you to swap the two: contact as source, member as target. There is no route back. Nothing turns a member into a contact. Deleting a member or processing a resignation leaves no contact behind, and the member record survives only as a hidden, deleted row. If your aim is to stop someone signing in while keeping their history, change their status instead of looking for a downgrade.

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What changes for the person

The moment the merge completes:
  • They can sign in. They use the surviving member record’s email address and its own password or one-time code. A contact had no login of its own, apart from the one-time code that opens the event app for an event they hold a ticket to.
  • Their event history follows them. Past registrations, tickets and check-ins sit on the member profile and in the attendee exports, one row per event.
  • Their money reads as a member’s. Payments, invoices and any recurring subscription now belong to the member, so reports that count members stop disagreeing with reports that count revenue.
  • A membership fee can be assigned. A contact never held one, so there is nothing to move: you assign the fee on the member profile after the merge. The exception is an organisation that counts donations towards membership, where the contact’s earlier donations can already count.
  • Their newsletter choice carries over, and an unsubscribe on either record sticks.

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Troubleshooting

Normal, and it is what merge is for. It happens when the two records have different email addresses, when someone bought a ticket or donated before joining and the automatic merge was skipped (see above), when the account was created with a default status other than Active, or when a mailing list was imported. Open Settings → Developers → Merge Records, look in the Contact-User Matches tab, and merge the contact into the member. Do not delete the contact instead: its payments and tickets would go with it, and a contact with a payment attached refuses to be deleted anyway.
Search the Contacts list for that email address. If the contact is still there, the new member holds only the email, birthday, gender and joined dates, and everything else is still on the contact. Merge the contact into the new member and the history moves across. If the contact is no longer listed, it was already folded into the member and there is nothing left to merge.
Check three things. They may not have confirmed their email with the code yet, and nothing merges before that. The contact may hold Event App history or a similar row that stops the automatic merge. Or the email on the contact is not exactly the one they registered with. In every case Merge Records will do it by hand.
Three things gate it. The Merge Profiles toggle under Settings → Modules → Users & Profiles → Configuration must be on, or the page redirects to the dashboard. You need to be an organisation-wide HR manager, which is above the chapter HR manager that lets you edit contacts. And the page itself lives under Settings → Developers, not in the Contacts screen. If you can open the page but the pair is rejected, check the direction: a member cannot be the source when a contact is the target.
They were copied onto the member when the merge ran, with the same author, text and date, and the contact record was then deleted. Open the member profile: they show on its Activity timeline and notes, as long as Enable Profile Notes & Activity is switched on under Settings → Modules → Users & Profiles → Configuration. With it off the notes are stored but hidden. Undoing the merge moves them back to the recreated contact.
Once, within 30 days, from Merge History. Undo puts the transferred records back on the source and rewinds the fields the merge changed on the survivor, unless you edited them since. A contact that was deleted comes back with a new id, so anything outside Orgo that stored the old id will not reconnect. Rows that were removed with the contact (the “do not move” list) do not come back. Anything created on the member since the merge stays there, so undo promptly if a merge was wrong.