There are a number of checks performed when requesting a merge of two person records, the full list is documented here. Certain checks are performed before allowing the merge to be scheduled and completed. merge cannot happen if:
Either person is currently subject to a pending merges.
Both people have child protection plans, which will overlap.
The source person has a carer approval.
The source person is an allocated party in care package for another person.
The source person has a budget care package of a type that conflicts with the target person.
Either person has an incomplete personal budget.
The source person has a financial assessment of a type that conflicts with the target person.
The source person is an allocated party in an existing service.
The source person is an allocated party in a service change.
Both people have incomplete changes for the same package type.
The source person has invoices.
The source person is an invoice payee.
The source person is an invoice payer.
The source person is a creditor invoice payee.
The source person has charge periods.
The source person is allocated element changes.
The source person has delivered actuals.
The source person is a payee on one or more remittance advices.
The source person is within their retention period.
The source person is already a household member of the target person.
The source person has a saved chronology used in a form.
The source and target people both have Education records, such as exclusions and activities.
Worker or organisation restrictions differ between source and target persons.
If the subjects being merged have any of these records in place, these will need to be managed manually before the merge can proceed.
The categories of data to be merged automatically are:
Case notes.
Steps.
Forms.
Documents.
Care Packages.
Visits.
Child Protection Enquiries.
Child Protection Registrations.
Where duplicate records exist and a person merge is prevented in Mosaic, a decision needs to be made by the customer as to which record should be retained and any information that can be replicated should be added to the retained record.
The record that will no longer be used should be restricted at this point to prevent any further data being added and a person note added to the record to be retained advising workers the other record exists and who to contact if they need to access any information.
Things to consider when duplicate records cannot be merged:
Statutory and Local reporting implications.
How the duplicate records got into this state and if a local process change or training is required.
Potential duplicate payments/charging/personal budgets.
If person delete with finance is appropriate (available from Mosaic 21.1).
Note on Merging Records with Finance Data
When planning for the delete person with finance functionality, we also looked at merging records containing finance data. Although we recognise that this would be a useful piece of functionality, it is extremely complicated as it would have to check for a lot of potential problems, such as overlapping payments or purchases, budgets, clashing carer records, etc. If we did decide it was feasible, it would take a large amount of time to complete.
We decided at the time that we would prioritise the development of deleting records with finance, as this would also help with duplicate records, as it would allow those to be deleted where appropriate. At present we do not have a plan for merging records with finance in the near future, although it is a requirement we are still aware of and will continue to evaluate against other items in our backlog.
Please also visit our knowledge article specific to where merge has failed due to a finance specific error: Merge Person has failed due to a Finance error