Duplicate vendors creep in quietly. Someone in the gift shop adds “Acme Printing” while someone in finance adds “Acme Printing Co.”, and a year later you have purchase orders, products, and payment history split across two records that are really the same supplier. Cleaning that up in Altru is less obvious than merging two duplicate members, and the right approach depends on what kind of record your “vendor” actually is.
First, figure out what a vendor is in your database
“Vendor” can mean two different things in an Altru database, and the answer to “can I merge these?” is different for each.
- A vendor that is an organization constituent. Many organizations track suppliers, caterers, tour operators, and sponsors as organization constituent records, sometimes with a constituency, attribute, or code that marks them as vendors. These are constituents, so the standard constituent duplicate and merge tools apply to them.
- A vendor used by merchandise. If you run a store in Altru, the merchandise side keeps its own vendor information tied to products and purchasing. Whether those vendor entries behave like constituents for merging purposes is something to confirm in your own database rather than assume.
The quick test: open one of the duplicate vendors and look at where it lives. If it has a full constituent record (addresses, relationships, revenue history, constituencies), treat it as a constituent merge. If it only shows up in merchandise setup, read the section on merchandise vendors below before doing anything.
Merging vendors that are organization constituents
This is the easier case. Altru’s constituent merge combines two records into one, with one record surviving and the other’s information folded into it. The part that trips people up is not the merge itself but the decisions around it.
Before you merge
- Pick the survivor on purpose. Usually that’s the record with the most history: revenue, purchase activity, relationships to contacts, and the correct legal name. Don’t just keep whichever one you opened first.
- Compare the fields that matter for vendors. Remit-to address, primary contact, phone, email, tax or payment notes. Write down anything on the duplicate that you want to keep, because you may need to re-enter values the merge doesn’t carry the way you expect.
- Check relationships. Vendor records often have individual contacts attached (an account rep, a billing contact). Make sure those relationships end up on the surviving organization and don’t get duplicated.
- Look for anything that points at the duplicate by ID. Saved queries filtered to one specific record, exports to an accounting system, or a spreadsheet keyed on lookup ID will need updating after the merge.
- Test once in a sandbox if you have one. Merges are hard to undo. Running one pair through a test environment shows you exactly what carries over and what doesn’t.
After you merge
- Open the surviving record and confirm the name, primary address, and contacts are what you intended.
- Spot-check that history from the duplicate (revenue, notes, relationships) now appears on the survivor.
- Add a short note on the record saying what was merged and when. The next person who wonders where “Acme Printing Co.” went will thank you.
Merchandise vendors: confirm before you assume
We’re not aware of a dedicated merge tool for merchandise vendor entries, and we’d rather say that plainly than guess. Before you clean these up, check in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support whether your version can merge them directly, and what happens to products and purchase orders linked to the duplicate.
If a direct merge isn’t available, the workable approach is a manual consolidation:
- Choose the surviving vendor and make sure its details are complete and current.
- Reassign active products to the surviving vendor so future purchasing points at the right place.
- Leave closed historical transactions alone. Rewriting old purchase history usually causes more confusion than it solves.
- Rename the duplicate so it’s obvious it shouldn’t be used, for example by adding “DO NOT USE, see Acme Printing” to the name, and mark it inactive if that option is available to you.
It isn’t elegant, but it stops new activity from landing on the wrong record, which is most of what a merge buys you.
Keep it from happening again
- Agree on a naming convention. Legal name, no “Inc.” or “Co.” variations, no abbreviations. Put it in your data entry guide.
- Search before adding. Ask staff to search by phone number or email domain, not just by name, before creating a new vendor.
- Limit who creates vendors. If every department can add suppliers, duplicates are guaranteed. One or two owners is usually enough.
- Run a periodic check. A simple organization query sorted by name, or grouped by phone or address, surfaces near-duplicates before they pile up history.
Finding duplicates at scale
If your vendors are organization constituents and the problem is bigger than a handful of pairs, Deduper finds duplicate constituent and email records in Altru so you can review and fix them in one pass instead of hunting with queries. It works on constituent records, so it applies to vendors stored that way, not to merchandise-only vendor entries.
