Merging Duplicate Entities
This article explains what merging does and what happens to your data, so you can confidently consolidate duplicate records. For the click-by-click walkthrough, see How to Merge Duplicate Entities.
What Merging Does
Over time, the same real-world person, company, or trust can end up recorded twice — a duplicate created by an XPM sync, a manual entry someone added without realising the record already existed, or an ASIC import whose name match just missed. Merging combines those two records into one.
When you merge, you choose:
- A record to keep (the target) — this is the entity that survives.
- A record to remove (the source) — this is the duplicate. After the merge it is archived.
Everything attached to the duplicate is moved onto the record you keep, and the duplicate is archived (soft-deleted) and removed from your lists. Nothing is silently dropped.
Which one do I open? Open the duplicate — the record you want to get rid of — and start the merge from there. You then pick the record to keep. See How to Merge Duplicate Entities for the exact steps.
What Moves to the Record You Keep
A merge moves every artifact attached to the duplicate onto the record you keep, in a single all-or-nothing operation:
- Relationships — shareholdings, directorships, trustee/beneficiary links, loans, leases, ownership, and so on. If the record you keep already has the equivalent relationship, the duplicate's copy is skipped rather than creating a second identical link (see Joint Holdings and Multiple Shareholdings of the Same Class for how same-class holdings are handled).
- Group memberships — any groups the duplicate belonged to are added to the record you keep.
- Notes and files — all attached notes and documents move across.
- Distributions — dividend, trust, and partnership distribution history follows the entity.
- Scenarios — scenario plans that reference the duplicate are repointed at the record you keep.
- Saved diagrams — node positions and settings in your saved diagram layouts are updated so the entity keeps its place on the canvas.
- XPM links — the Xero Practice Manager mapping is handled (see XPM Links and Merging below).
After the merge you'll land on the surviving record's entity page, now carrying everything from both.
Resolving Field Conflicts
The two records may hold different values for the same field — for example a different trading name, ABN, or address. During the merge you'll review only the fields that differ and choose, for each one, whether to keep the value from the record you keep or from the duplicate.
- By default, the record you keep wins every field, so its details are preserved.
- Where the duplicate holds the better value (including a value the kept record is missing), choose the duplicate's side for that field.
- Fields that already match are taken as-is and aren't shown.
The Preview
Before anything changes, the merge shows a preview of exactly what will happen — how many relationships will move, how many duplicate relationships will be skipped, how many groups, notes, files, distributions, scenarios, and diagrams are affected, and the XPM outcome. These numbers come from a trial run of the real merge, so the preview can never disagree with the result. Nothing is committed until you confirm.
Archiving, Not Deleting
The duplicate is archived, not permanently deleted:
- It no longer appears in your entity lists or pickers.
- It is retained in your audit history, with a pointer recording that it was merged into the surviving record.
Because the merge moves every reference first and only then archives the duplicate, you won't be left with scenarios or diagrams quietly pointing at a removed record. A built-in integrity check runs at the end of every merge: if anything would still reference the duplicate, the entire merge is cancelled and rolled back — your data is left exactly as it was.
XPM Links and Merging
If your organisation is connected to Xero Practice Manager, the merge resolves the XPM link based on which records are linked:
- Only the record you keep is linked — nothing to do; its link is retained.
- Only the duplicate is linked — the link is transferred to the record you keep.
- Both are linked — the surviving record keeps its own link, and the duplicate's link is removed in StructureGram only. The duplicate client still exists in XPM and should be cleaned up there. Use XPM Reconciliation to resolve the leftover XPM client.
See also Push to Xero Practice Manager for how StructureGram entities map to XPM clients.
Who Can Merge
Merging is available to users who can edit both records. You need entity-edit permission on the duplicate and the record you keep, across all the groups each belongs to. If you can't edit one of them, the merge is blocked. See Group Access and Permissions.
Limitations
- Same type only. You can merge a company into a company, an individual into an individual, and so on — but not across types (e.g. an individual into a company).
- Same organisation. Both records must belong to the organisation you're currently working in.
- Two records at a time. Merge duplicates pairwise; to collapse three records, merge twice.
- Archived records can't be merged. Both sides must be active.