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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. Only one of them combines the two records into a single history, and only one of them shows you what it is about to do. 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 what will move.
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. Undo restores field values, but it cannot bring back records that were deleted with the contact.
The contact’s Notes are the one thing a merge destroys outright, and undo does not bring them back. If a note holds something you need, a phone call summary, a consent record, why the person was flagged, copy it onto the member profile before you merge.

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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.
  • Anything worth keeping from the contact’s Notes is copied onto the member profile.
  • 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.

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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, no field-by-field choice, and no undo. What happens to the contact afterwards is decided by Settings → 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, tickets or notes worth keeping. Use Merge Records instead: you see what will move before you commit, and you have 30 days to undo it. 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.
Registering a member from scratch, and what the welcome email contains, is covered in Adding Members.

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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.
  • Their newsletter subscription carries over, so a subscribed contact stays subscribed as a member.

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Troubleshooting

Normal, and it is what merge is for. It happens when someone bought a ticket or donated before joining, 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.
Three things gate it. The Merge Profiles toggle under Settings → Users & Profiles must be on, or the page redirects to the dashboard. You need HR_TENANT, which is above the HR_LOCAL 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.
Contact notes belong to the contact record, and the contact record is deleted at the end of a merge. They are not copied onto the member, and undo restores field values rather than deleted notes. Copy anything you need onto the member profile before merging. Notes written on a member profile are unaffected.
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. Anything created on the member since the merge stays there, so undo promptly if a merge was wrong.