Importing Contacts to Accounts: Duplicate lookup reference found.

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Posted on by houstonbrooke

I'm trying to import contacts into accounts that already exist on CRM, and have been de-duplicated. However, I'm still getting import failures because of error 0x80040352 - A duplicate lookup refernce was found.

My theory is that because we have accounts that have similar names, it thinks they're the same account. For example: Alamo Realty and Alamo Construction.

The only time I got it to work was when I tested a .csv with one row, mapping to an account that has absolutely no similarities to any other account names.

I've spent hours researching this and have gotten nowhere. Help would be GREATLY appreciated!

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houstonbrooke on at

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Oh, and I have CRM 2011 online.

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AFTAB HUSSAIN Microsoft Employee on at

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HI,

You can try the following

first you can download xml template file. For the same goto setting >> template choice which entity you want to import data.

Fill the file and import data ..

I hope this would work.

Thank You !

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houstonbrooke on at

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I figured it out actually. Well, I called and walked through it with someone. What it was is that there are still inactive duplicate accounts in the system from when we merged them earlier on.

Apparently Dynamics will still try to match a contact with an inactive account - I wasn't aware of that.

So I never looked at the inactive view to see if that was the case. You have to completely delete them after doing any duplicate merging process before trying to upload contacts.

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Dapadon 5 on at

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Just read your error and resolution, I've been trying for 4hours... parsing in / deleting & analysing. Then i read your post... i have'nt even tried it yet but I guarantee thats the answer as I've recently merged a couple of accounts - specifically those that the error report mention. So... i just wanted to say, thanks a bunch for going to the effort of adding this blog / support case :) all the best, Colin.

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David in Toronto 5 on at

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I have our team of data administrators put a ^^ into the contact Last Name or the Account Name of the record that will be deactivated. We then keep them for one week after the merge so that we can restore if we accidentally deactivated the wrong account. Each week we run an Advanced Find that searches for all deactivated accounts where Account Name CONTAINS ^^ and was modified more than 7 days prior. We do the same for Contact Records using Last Name CONTAINS ^^ and modified more than 7 days ago. We delete all those records that show up in the Advanced Find. Problem is - you have to watch out if people improperly use the ^^ when deactivating records that they have not merged. It would be much better to have a way to "see" the Merged = Yes/No field.

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Cada on at

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Thanks :) Just had to delete the inactive records.

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Donna Edwards 2,996 on at

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I generally encourage people to create a workflow that adds (concatenates) the word inactive to one of the name fields for contacts and accounts rather than delete the record. The reason I prefer not to delete is that you lose all related activities and other records when you delete unless you have merged the record with another.

If you do choose to delete records that meet certain conditions, you can create a bulk delete job in CRM to do that for you on a scheduled basis.

Hope this helps.

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Richard708 10 on at

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This inactive accounts solution does not work for me. I have no inactive accounts according to the inactive accounts view, advanced search shows no inactive accounts, I have created new views where status is not active and nothing shows. I have two companies where any contact I import gets the duplicate reference error. Any kind of account search shows only one account (active) with that name. I have changed the reference look-up on the import to ensure they are using the account name and contact company (no "primary key" usage). Still getting the error.

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