More than one record matches this reporter
An agent opens a request and gets a warning triangle instead of the customer: "More than one record matches this reporter.", or "4 or more records match this reporter.", followed by a short list of candidates.
This is the card refusing to pick. Every candidate matched the same address, so choosing one would be a guess, and a guess on a customer card is worse than an honest list.
#What the card shows
A warning triangle and one of the two sentences above.
Up to three candidates, each with the record's name and, where Attio gave the app a web address for it, an "Open in Attio" button.
One line of distinguishing detail under each name: the word "Added" and the date the record was added to Attio.
There is no way to pick one from the card. The card is telling the reader to go and disambiguate in Attio, and the app never writes to the CRM, so resolving duplicates is work that happens there.
#Why the count is never an exact number above the ceiling
Attio's search answers carry no total, and there is no way to ask it for one, so the app requests one more record than it will ever show. That is how it knows there are more without spending a second lookup, and it is why the copy says "4 or more" rather than inventing a number.
#The two matching methods behave differently here
Records that matched | Matching the person | Matching their company |
|---|---|---|
One | The card shows that customer. | The card shows that customer. |
Two or three | The card lists the candidates. | The card lists the candidates. |
Four or more | The card still lists three candidates, with a note that four or more matched. | The card shows nothing: no record and no candidate list. |
The Matching step states the company rule in full: "One record and the card shows it. Up to 3 and the agent is asked which one. 4 or more and the card shows nothing at all, because a domain that resolves to that many records is almost always free mail, a shared host or an email-service sending domain, and every candidate on the list would probably be the wrong customer."
#Whether duplicates are possible at all is reported before you ship the card
When matching a person, the Matching screen says whether Attio enforces the chosen attribute as unique. If it does: "Two records cannot share the same value, so a reporter can only ever match one record. The card will never ask an agent to choose." If it does not: "Attio does not enforce uniqueness on this attribute and there is no setting that changes that. When a reporter matches several records, the card lists them and lets the agent open the right one rather than guessing."
The same candidate comes up every time. Both lookups ask Attio to sort by creation date and then by record identifier, so a reporter that matches several records shows the same customer, or the same candidate order, on every view. A refresh never quietly swaps one customer for another.
#Why the candidates carry so little detail
A candidate shows its title and the date it was added, and nothing else. No CRM field is used, because a field nobody selected must not reach the browser, and the email address is never used, because every candidate matched the same address anyway and the card never prints an address. If the candidates are hard to tell apart, that is a sign the duplicates want merging in Attio rather than a sign the card is holding something back.
#A few things worth knowing
The Fields preview quietly hides this. When several records hold the test address it says "More than one Attio record holds that address. The values below come from the first match; an agent gets the choice instead.", so a preview that looks perfectly healthy can be an ambiguity in disguise.
In company mode, four or more matches produce the ordinary no-match sentence rather than a list, so "nothing in Attio" and "far too much in Attio" read identically to an agent.
A record with no name is titled from its record identifier, for example "Person 8f3a1b2c", never from its email address. Candidates that all look like that are nameless records in Attio, not a fault on the card.
#Related
The card lists them because it cannot honestly choose.
