In our time supporting certification, licensure, and accreditation programs, we’ve learned to identify and resolve the “little things” that can add up to a big headache. Duplicate Member accounts are one of those things.
Duplicate accounts can skew your reporting and confuse candidates who don’t understand why, for example, what they entered while logged in to the account they created with their work email differs from what they entered in the one they created with their personal email.
Luckily, LearningBuilder’s Merge Accounts feature lets you consolidate two Member accounts into a single record without losing any of the history from either account. With it, you can:
- Combine applications, activities, payments, communications, and files into a single record.
- Preserve the audit trail of who merged what and when.
- Resolve duplicate accounts created through AMS integrations and other external imports.
- Prevent data loss and discrepancies.
Why Duplicate Accounts Happen
Duplicate Member accounts show up in almost every program we support. The most common causes include:
- Multiple credentials, multiple accounts. A Practitioner holds multiple credentials and creates a separate account for each, unaware that a single account can support them both.
- Reactivating a lapsed credential. Rather than logging back into an existing account, the Practitioner starts fresh with a new one.
- External record imports. Data brought in from another system creates a second account for someone who already exists in LearningBuilder.
- AMS and SSO scenarios. When account creation is handled through your AMS or SSO, it’s easy for a Practitioner to spin up a new account without realizing it. We also see Practitioners alternate between email addresses, signing up with a Gmail address one day and a Yahoo address the next, then wondering why they can’t find the work they completed yesterday.
Regardless of the cause, resolving duplicates follows the same approach: Merge them.
What’s Wrong With Deleting a Duplicate?
What is the danger of deletion? Perhaps the better question is, what information is part of someone’s LearningBuilder account? The answer is: Almost everything. That includes applications, activities, communications, payments, file libraries, and potentially even private account notes written by an admin. When someone performs a merge, all the accounts are combined into a single record. The merge shows up in the account notes, providing an audit trail of who did what and when.
When you delete an account, however…Poof. The resulting data losses and discrepancies can potentially affect reporting or even require manual data re-entry. Before considering account deletion, it’s important to understand the risks involved.
LearningBuilder Makes it Easy to Merge Your Member Accounts
The merge process is built to give admins clear visibility into what’s about to happen before anything is committed.
- Pick the two accounts. Start by identifying the two Member accounts you want to combine. Their details load side by side so you can compare them.
- Choose the persistent account. One account is designated the persistent account and stays in the system. The other is the merged account. By default, the account on the left is the persistent one, but you can click the right-hand column header to swap them. Some profile data combines automatically — additional email addresses, mailing addresses, and phone numbers all carry over to the persistent account. Other fields, like profile image, name, and primary email, belong to the persistent account only; the merged account’s versions are discarded.
- Resolve Role conflicts. If both accounts hold the same Role, you’ll choose one set of Role attributes to keep. It’s all-or-nothing per Role — you can’t mix and match individual fields. Applications, though, always come along: every application from both Roles moves onto the persistent Role, with cycle dates, statuses, and activities intact. If there are applications you don’t want, you can delete them afterward.
- Preview and commit. Before anything is finalized, a preview screen shows you exactly what the merged record will look like, with only the persistent data displayed. Once you commit, the merge can’t be reversed, so the preview is your last chance to confirm.
The full action is recorded in the persistent account’s notes, so you always have a record of how that account came to be.
Note: A handful of account types can’t be merged through the UI, including accounts with aliases, multi-instance Roles, or Providers tied to Activities. When you are faced with one of those cases, a member of the Heuristics team can help you move the data manually.
Part of LearningBuilder’s Complete Credential Management Solution
LearningBuilder isn’t a static product. We’re always working to turn the everyday challenges of credential management into simple, built-in solutions, and Merge Accounts is just one example of our ongoing commitment to optimizing the time you spend in the system.
Want to take advantage of this feature as a current LearningBuilder client? Contact your Customer Success Lead if you’re a current LearningBuilder user. If you’re exploring certification management options, schedule a discovery call with our team today.
