Handling Duplicate Family Records

On rare occasions, you may find yourself dealing with a duplicate family in your database. While this is rare – mainly due to the Customer Portal's ability to help prevent duplicates – it can be a lot of work to reconcile two sets of family records.

What causes duplicate records?

They can occur for a variety of reasons. The two most common reasons are:

• A spouse created their own customer record when logging onto your Customer Portal, using a completely different email address and even different contact information from the other parent (possibly divorced or separated).
• A staff member created a new customer record even though they were already in your database under a different last name or that was hidden because it was in an "inactive" status.

No matter the reason, the solution requires a bit of decision making.

The problem and the solutions

A common question we get: "Can't I simply 'merge' the two families?" While that sounds simple, there are so many pieces of data and questions to clarify that its nearly impossible for software to make those decisions. You'll have to ask yourself:

• Does one of the records contain transaction history you want to preserve?
• Which address and contact information should be saved?
• Are students already enrolled in classes on one of the family records?
• Are there notes, policies, online orders and other historical data I want to keep?

...and so on. This leaves it up to you, the administrator, to handle. The best approach to eliminating your duplicate family records is to do the following:

1. Look at each duplicate record and assess which family has the most extensive transaction history, student enrollment history, policies, and other important customer and student historical data. Let's call this collection of family data (customer and students) the "keeper" records.
2. Once you've identified the records you want to keep, flag the other family records with a colored background to help you remember these are the records you'll delete once you are finished merging.
3. For each important record in the family, starting with your students, see what data is on the other record that you may want to transfer to your "keeper" record before you delete it.
4. Add that data to your "keeper" record.

Then rinse and repeat, adding any additional information needed to your "keeper" records until you feel you have captured the most important parts.

Once you feel you have everything you need on your "keeper" records for that family, go ahead and delete the duplicate family records.

Send Announcements and Messages to Your Staff

With the new Staff Messages feature, your staff can now send messages to any other staff member in the Staff Portal. Administrators with the staff_messages_admin privilege can also send individual messages or global announcements to all staff members from the Administrative side of ClassJuggler. Global announcements are useful for requesting substitute teachers for a class or for announcing an upcoming staff meeting or event.

You'll find the Staff Messages feature on your Staff Portal menu or right on your Home Base menu as an administrator if you have the aformentioned security privilege. Check out the online help guide for complete details on how to use this feature.

Watch and Learn

If you prefer learning by watching video tutorials, rather than reading how to do something new in ClassJuggler, we encourage you to keep an eye on our growing collection of tutorial videos in the ClassJuggler Tutorial Videos section of our YouTube channel. Here are a couple of our favorites:

• How to Work With Account Categories. Learn how to set up and use account categories for detailed financial reporting. We cover understanding and setting up account categories & subcategories, which is useful for tracking and reporting on merchandise, classes by types of classes, and much more.
• ClassJuggler's Deposit Summary Report feature. Learn how this flexible report can help you quickly reconcile your monthly bank statement and merchant account statement to your ClassJuggler customer payments.

To make sure you don't miss any new videos, just click the SUBSCRIBE button on YouTube to be notified of the latest tutorial videos.