How to Merge Accounts in Salesforce: A Complete Guide

Keeping your CRM free from duplicate contacts is an industry best practice - it helps prevent mismatched records, skewed data analytics and lessens your team confusion.

Even better, it means less time spent on administrative tasks and more on actual selling. We - the folks here at Salestrail - are all about sales efficiency, so we’ve created a comprehensive and user-friendly guide on how to merge accounts in Salesforce. Jump to any section.

Salesforce: How to merge accounts

Merge duplicate accounts in Salesforce classic
Merge duplicate accounts in Salesforce Lightning
Merge non-duplicate accounts
Mass merge tools

Merge duplicate accounts in Salesforce classic

Step 1: Go to the Accounts tab and click Merge Accounts in the Tools section. If you can't see it, ask permission from your admin account.

Step 2: First enter a search string to find potential duplicate accounts. The list will show accounts that start with your search string.

Step 3: Select up to three accounts you want to merge. Then click Next.

Step 4: Here, you need to select one account as the master record and choose the fields that you want to retain from each record.

Fields with conflicting values are highlighted.

Step 5: Then click Merge. Easy-peasy, right?

Merge duplicate accounts in Salesforce Lightning Experience

Step 1: With Salesforce Lightning Experience, you need to go to a specific account record. If there are potential duplicates, you can click View Duplicates to see them.

However, it seems only exact same account names are registered as potential duplicates in the Lightning Experience.

If you can't find the duplicates you want to merge, switch to Salesforce classic and use the Merge Accounts tool.

Step 2: Like how we do it with Salesforce classic, you can choose up to three account records to merge. Then click Next.

Screenshot by Salesforce

Step 3: Similarly, here you need to choose one account record as the master, and choose the field values that you want to keep. Then click Next.

merging accounts salesforce lightning screenshot

Screenshot by Salesforce

Step 4: Confirm your choices and merge. And it's done!

Screenshot by Salesforce

Note: You can only merge business accounts or person accounts together. These two can't be mixed.

Merge accounts with completely different names

At some point, you may need to merge non-duplicate accounts for reasons such as a client changing their name.

There's no one exact way to do it. But here is a simple and effective method we have used when trying to merge non-duplicate accounts.

Step 1: Edit name manually

From your Account Tab, find the old account you would like to merge, for example, Corporate US. Then click edit, add the new name at the beginning like in the screenshot.

After you've done, click Save.

Then go back to Merge Accounts tool, and enter your search string. The returned results will include your edited accounts.

Step 2: Then just repeat the steps in merging for duplicate accounts in Salesforce Classic

How to mass merge accounts in Salesforce

Currently, Salesforce only allows users to merge up to 3 accounts at one time. This can be time-consuming if you need to merge lists of thousand contacts.

Using Excel is always possible, if you’re an Excel wizard.

If not, chances are that it’ll take a huge amount of time and effort, without any guaranteed results that do not create additional issues later on.

After having done some shopping around, here’s our selected Salesforce software and apps that’ll help you ease the pain.