Duplicate Phone Number and Phone Type Error in RE7

Kevin Schaeffer

I'm getting an error of duplicate phone numbers and type after I mark multiple emails addresses as inactive in Raiser's Edge 7; however, there are no duplicates. This usually happens when I find a record that has the same email duplicated 3 or 4 times and I try to mark all but one of them inactive. It updates to the point where only one email is showing but continues to give me the error message and I get stuck, unable to save my changes and being forced to close the record without saving. Just wondering if this is a glitch of some sort or if I'm doing something wrong.

Sarah Ellison

RE searches for duplicates in both active and inactive phone numbers.  Marking duplicate phone numbers as inactive won't stop that error message because they are still on the record - they're just hidden from view most of the time.  


So far, the best solution we've found here is to keep the oldest duplicated phone number as the active one and delete the rest of the duplicates.  I'm rarely a proponent of deleting anything, but in this case keeping the duplicates really doesn't add any value whatsoever for us. 


if you do have a reason to track the same number on the same record multiple times, you could change the phone type to something different (if you have multiple multiples, you would need multiple new phone types, or you'll still get the error message).  I'd recommend noting something in the Comments field if you went that route, or only using those specific phone types for archiving duplicates - otherwise you can get caught in the loop of wondering whether a phone number was marked inactive because it was duplicated, or if it's a bad number that someone 'helpfully' added back on the record.

Kevin Schaeffer

Thanks for your reply Sarah. I'm a relatively new RE user so I'm definitely still working out all the ins and outs of the system. Yeah it seems as though I'll just have to delete the duplicates to avoid the error message, it's probably the best way to avoid further confusion. What I don't understand is how they get entered as duplicates in the first place (shouldn't that error come up as soon as they're entered?) but this will solve my problem for now. Thanks again!