When the Same Customer Is in TORO Twice

It happens in every shop. A regular gives you their mobile one visit and their home number the next, and now there are two of them in TORO. Or an online order came in while somebody was already ringing that customer up at the counter, and both tills created the record.

The problem isn't the clutter. It's that their history is now split down the middle. Neither record tells you what that person actually buys, their rewards points are in two piles, and the member discount they've earned is sitting on the record you didn't attach.

TORO has two tools for this, both on the Customers tab of the Dashboard.

Possible Duplicate Customers

Start here. This screen finds records that share a phone number and groups them together, showing each one side by side with how many sales sit on it.

That last part is what you're reading. Usually one record has three years of purchases and the other has none — easy call. Sometimes both have real history, which is exactly the case a human has to settle.

Open Possible Duplicate Customers from the Customers tab.
Pick the record you want to keep — normally the one with the fuller history and the correct name and email.
Press Combine.

Everything from the other records for that phone number moves onto the one you kept.

There's deliberately no field-by-field merge screen here. You're not being asked to arbitrate thirty fields at the counter — you pick which record survives, and TORO moves the rest.

Merge Accounts

The duplicate finder only catches people who share a phone number. When the same customer was entered twice under different numbers — the mobile one time, the home number the next — nothing links them, so nothing shows up on that screen.

Merge Accounts handles those. Pick any two customer records and TORO merges the one on the left into the one on the right. Underneath it's the same merge as the other screen, so "combine two customers" means exactly the same thing either way.

What Actually Moves

Everything that points at a customer:

Sales and transaction history
Open tabs and items on hold
Rewards points and gift certificates
Store credit
Any saved card on file

TORO works this out by looking at your own database and finding every table that refers to a customer, rather than working from a fixed list. That matters because not every store is on an identical schema, and a table TORO had never heard of is precisely how a customer's history would get left behind. The whole move happens as one operation — it either all lands on the keeper, or nothing does.

Nothing Gets Deleted

The record you merged away isn't removed. It's marked inactive, so it stops turning up when your cashier searches, but it's still there.

Both records also get a history entry recording what happened and who did it. If you ever need to explain where a customer's purchases went, it's written down — you'll find it in the Account Change Log.

TORO Tidies the Empty Ones Itself

You won't have to work through a long list of these by hand. When this update lands, TORO looks for duplicate records that were never used for anything — no sales, no tabs, no store credit, no saved card — and deactivates them on its own, leaving the real record untouched. Your managers get a message listing exactly what it did.

Two things it deliberately leaves alone:

Anything with real history on both sides. That's a judgement call, so it comes to you on the Possible Duplicate Customers screen instead.
Placeholder phone numbers. Stores often ring up walk-ins under something like 123-456-9999, which means dozens of unrelated people share a "number." Those are never touched.

The Cause Is Fixed Too

Worth knowing, so you're not expecting the pile to keep growing: two tills downloading the same online order at the same moment could each create the customer. Worse, once somebody had two records, TORO stopped recognising them at all — so every online order after that made yet another one.

Both of those are fixed. What's on your Possible Duplicate Customers screen today is the backlog, not an ongoing leak.

Who Can Use These

Both screens start out available to admins only. If you want your managers merging customers, give us a call and we'll switch it on for them.