Deduping and Merge help needed

[Sean Larkin]

Greetings,

I've been assigned a project, where I need to find duplicate customers and merge their info into one record. I am using 5.5v2.

I took care of finding the duplicates without any problems. I created a new calculation field (DupCombo1), which combined the customers' street address and zipcode (those were the criteria I was told to use), then did a find with ! in the DupCombo1 field.

What I need to do is merge some of the sales information (like total sales & year to date stuff) into one of the duplicate records, and delete the rest. For example, say a company has been placed in our database twice, because whoever ordered used the company name one time, and then their name another. They've been ordering with either name for a couple years. We want to delete either of the records, but first, we want to add the amounts in its sales field to the amount in the sales field of the record we're keeping.

I hope that explains it. Is there anyway to automate this?

I was thinking that I should export the duplicates into their one file, to do this merging, and then bring them back in. What do you recommend? Thanks.