An automation action is a step that performs a task, activity, event, or change. Think of a action as:

When Something happens (the Trigger) and These Conditions are true, then This Event (the Action) occurs.

SmartSuite's Merge Records action allows you to automatically identify and merge duplicate records within a Table in SmartSuite. If you haven't already, we also recommend that you check out our articles on creating an automation and managing automations for more information about setting up new workflows.

Simply click the Automations option in the Solution drop-down menu (see image below).

Accessing the Automations configuration interface:

Once the Solution Automations dialog is displayed, click Add Automation to begin creating an automation that will interact with SmartSuite's Merge Records action.

You will need to set up a trigger to tell the Automation when to run and which record to use as the source of data for your Merge Record action. For this action, the trigger has to be a SmartSuite record that contains data, so both "At a scheduled time" and "Gmail: When an email is received" will not allow you to use this action.

After creating your automation and selecting your Trigger, you can select Merge Records from the SmartSuite section of the Add Actions list.

This is the table you want to de-duplicate. The table selection is inherited from your trigger, but it is displayed read-only for you in this interface so you can verify you have the correct one selected.

This is where you select the fields you are looking to compare for every record in the table to find a match. This matching process is case insensitive and performs an exact match.
See the table below for two examples using the email field to show how the case in-sensitive exact match works.

If you're only selecting one field for your matching criteria, this section can be ignored. If you're selecting multiple fields to match on, this is where you will determine how these should be checked.

Expanding on the example above if you wanted to determine a record match by requiring equal values in both Full Name and Email fields, leave the default of AND. If a match should be determined by either Full Name OR Email matching, select the OR operator.

In this section you provide the Merge automation with instructions on how to combine values in a merged version of the record. There are three types of action available:

Duplicate records are merged into the oldest record based on creation date, preserving the record's activity history. Merged records are automatically deleted and moved to the recycle bin.

For more information on related topics, see these articles: