Object Settings: Survivorship & Safety#

Object Settings give you fine-grained control over how Dedupify presents duplicates for review and what happens during a merge. Settings are configured per object type — Contacts, Companies, Deals, and Tickets — on the Object Settings tab.

The Dedupify Object Settings tab with survivorship and safety controls

Survivorship and safety controls on the Object Settings tab.

Duplicate Review Property Display#

Choose which fields appear in the side-by-side comparison when you review a candidate pair, and set the order they display in.

Dedupify ships with sensible defaults for each object type:

  • Contacts: first name, last name, email, phone, company
  • Companies: name, domain, phone, city, industry
  • Deals: deal name, amount, pipeline, deal stage
  • Tickets: subject, content, pipeline, status

You can add, remove, or reorder any HubSpot property from the object. Showing the right fields makes it much faster to judge whether two records are the same entity.

Survivorship: Which Record Wins#

When two records merge, one becomes the primary (the surviving record) and the other is removed. The survivorship settings determine which one Dedupify treats as primary.

Primary Selection Mode#

Choose one of two modes:

  • Fallback Only — Dedupify picks the primary using the fallback strategy you set (see below). Use this for a simple, consistent rule across all merges.
  • Ordered Rules — Dedupify evaluates a list of conditions in order. The first condition that matches determines the primary. If no condition matches, the fallback strategy applies.

Fallback Strategy#

When no ordered rule resolves the primary (or when you are using Fallback Only mode), Dedupify falls back to one of:

  • Keep Older Record — the record created first becomes the primary.
  • Keep Newer Record — the most recently created record becomes the primary.
  • Keep Record with More Data — the record with more populated properties becomes the primary.

Ordered Primary-Selection Rules#

When using Ordered Rules mode, you build a prioritized list of conditions. Each condition is a combination of:

  • Property — the HubSpot property to evaluate
  • Operator — one of: Equals, Does Not Equal, Is Blank, Is Known, Is Newest, Is Oldest, Greater Than, Less Than
  • Value (optional, depending on the operator)

Dedupify tests each condition in order and selects the record that matches first. If neither record matches any condition, the fallback strategy is used.

Field Merge Overrides#

By default, the surviving record keeps its own property values. Field merge overrides let you change this per property — useful when one record consistently has better data in a specific field.

For each property you configure, choose:

Which value wins:

  • Keep Primary — the surviving record’s value is always used.
  • Keep Secondary — the non-surviving record’s value is always used.
  • Keep Newest — the value that was most recently updated wins.
  • Keep Oldest — the value from the record edited least recently wins.
  • Prefer Valid Email — picks the value that is a properly-formatted email address.
  • Prefer Complete Phone — picks the value that is the most fully-specified phone number.

Null handling:

  • Prefer Known Value — if one record has a value and the other is blank, the non-blank value wins regardless of the “which value wins” rule above.
  • Preserve Blank — blanks are treated as intentional; the blank value can win.

Never Merge Rules#

Never Merge Rules are hard exclusions. Any pair where one or both records match a Never Merge Rule is permanently blocked from merging — regardless of the confidence score or auto-merge settings.

Use these to protect records you must never combine, such as records owned by different business units, records that carry a specific tag, or records in a particular pipeline stage.

Each Never Merge Rule defines:

  • Property — the HubSpot property to check
  • Operator — one of: Equals, Does Not Equal, Contains, Is Blank, Is Known, Email Domain Equals
  • Value (optional, depending on the operator)
  • Trigger scope — controls which record(s) must match for the block to apply:
    • Either record matches — the pair is blocked if either record satisfies the condition.
    • Both records match — the pair is only blocked if both records satisfy the condition.
    • Surviving record matches — the pair is blocked based on the record Dedupify would designate as primary.

Never Merge Rules are evaluated before any merge is attempted, whether initiated manually or through auto-merge.

Backward Reviewing & Merging Duplicates How Scanning Works Forward