Salesforce Duplicate Rules

In Salesforce the duplicate rules can be found in 'Setup' under the 'Home' tab.

Here, you can create new duplicate rules or edit existing rules. Duplicate rules that are active will have a check in the 'Active' column. You can have up to five active duplicate rules per object.

Duplicate Rule Settings

Whether creating a new rule or editing an existing one, you'll have several options for how to handle duplicates. For example, the 'Standard Account Duplicate Rule' allows the creation and updating of duplicate records.

Rule Details

Using the 'Standard Account Duplicate Rule' as an example you can see that there are several sections in the rule. The 'Rule Details' section shows the rule name, rule description, the object the rule refers to, and the record-level security.

Actions

The 'Actions' section determines how duplicate records are handled. You can set what happens when a user attempts to create a duplicate record or update one. You can allow or block users from creating duplicate records and create an alert that will appear when users try to make duplicate records.

Matching Rules

Matching rules determine duplicate records by determining what fields to compare and how to match them. By default, the standard duplicate rules come with their own set of matching rules.

Conditions

Conditions allow you to create custom conditions that a record must meet for the rule to run.

Example

To put it all together, use the 'Standard Account Duplicate Rule' as an example. The 'Standard Account Duplicate Rule' compares Accounts with the matching rule criteria to determine if an account is a duplicate. If it is identified as a duplicate, users can create and edit duplicate accounts, but will only see an alert when trying to create a duplicate account.