We often received requests to clean up the data in Salesforce. When users are entering the data, they are unaware that the record with the same name exists in the system. Therefore users keep creating records with the same name, which later come in to notice, and a lot of effort is required to find and remove the duplicate data.

Duplicate data is expensive and sometimes it ended up with a loss in your business.

For example, duplicate customer records in a campaign can eat the budget and time of the outreach team, when customers are contacted multiple times by different reps for the same marketing outreach. It also looks unprofessional and will likely harm your reputation too.

There are several apps on AppExchange to remove duplicate records from your Salesforce instance if you are struggling with duplicate data in your org. Below are my recommendation:

1. Duplicate Check for Salesforce
2. Prevent duplicates in real-time with DupeCatcher
3. Cloudingo: Remove duplicates and improve data quality
4. DemandTools. Ensure your data remains your most valuable asset

Let’s come back to the blog post topic – preventing the users from entering the duplicate value in the name field is one way to stop the user from creating duplicate records, which can call Make the Name Field Unique.

You can control duplicate values in the Name field; if the user violates the rules, you can display a warning message and prevent the user from saving the record.

Before going ahead if you haven’t gotten a chance to read my previous article, it is time now to check them out – Create Visual Indicators by Adding Emojis.

Let’s start with a real-time use case.

Use Case

Last evening Sara (Salesforce Consultant) was having a conversation with the sales manager. She found that the sales reps are not meeting their KPI as there are many tour packages with the same name. She agreed to put some solutions in place so that in the future, no one is allowed to create multiple tour packages with the same name.

Solution

If you search for a solution for the above business scenario, you may be able to find multiple solutions—for example, Flow, Flow, validation rule, or apex trigger. But the question is, what is the optimal solution? 

The answer is Duplicate Rules. Yes, you heard it right!!!! Duplicate Rules – Meenakshi, can you tell me more about it. 

The duplicate Rule is an out-of-the-box feature that allows us to stop duplicate data creation. Check out this Trailhead module to learn more about it 

1. Click Setup. 
2. In the Quick Find box, type Matching Rules, and select Matching Rules. 
3. Click on New Rule and select Object name (i.e. Tour Package). Click Next.
4. Give a Rule Name: Tour Package Matching Rule, Unique name will auto-populate.
5. Define Matching Criteria,
   1. Field: Tour Package Name
   2. Matching Method: Exact

6. Click Save, and don’t forget to Activate it.
7. Now in the Quick Find box, type Duplicate Rules and select Duplicate Rules.
8. Click on New Rule and select Object name (i.e. Tour Package).
   1. Rule Name: Tour Package Duplicate Rule
   2. Action on Create and Action on Edit: Block
   3. Compare Tour Package with: Tour Package
   4. Matching Rule: Tour Package Matching Rule

9. Click Save and Activate the rule.

Let’s see how it looks.

You are Done!!!

I would love to hear about your experience to make the field unique by using duplicate rules. How do you use it?