The Same Customer Keeps Showing Up as a Duplicate

If a customer you recognise from previous visits shows up as a brand-new customer record, it helps to understand exactly how the system matches customers.

Example: Say a regular at a massage studio usually books with their personal mobile number, but this time books with a work landline instead. The name and any past notes clearly belong to the same person, but the customer list now shows an entirely separate customer card. If staff don't catch this, that customer's visit history and loyalty points end up split across two different cards.

1. Why duplicates happen: When a new booking comes in, the system matches it to an existing customer using phone number only (non-digit characters like hyphens are stripped before comparing). There's no fallback matching by email address. So a new customer card gets created any time the same person books under:
   • A new or changed phone number
   • A number entered with a typo
   • A number that looks the same but normalises differently
   • A shared landline used once, and their own mobile the next time
2. What to do when you spot a duplicate: Use the tag and note features described in "Using Customer Tags and Notes" to flag both cards as a suspected duplicate, confirm it's the same person at their next visit, and ask them to use the same phone number going forward.
3. Impact on loyalty points: Loyalty points accrue per customer record (see "Setting Up Customer Loyalty Points"), so a duplicate record splits that customer's point history in two. If tracking loyalty accurately matters for a regular customer, the most reliable fix is simply confirming their phone number at every booking.

Making sure staff know phone number is the only matching key goes a long way towards cutting down duplicate records.