Bulk Merge Duplicate Pipedrive Person Records From an Excel workbook

The Scenario

Your data quality analyst found the problem during a routine CRM audit. Forty contact pairs — the same person entered twice, sometimes with slight name variations, sometimes from different import sources. She has a Excel workbook with two columns: person_id and merge_with_id. The plan is to keep the merge_with_id record and fold the other one into it.

In Pipedrive, merging two person records is a manual UI operation. You open one person, click the three-dot menu, select Merge with, search for the second person by name, confirm. That is roughly five clicks and a search per merge. Forty pairs means 200 clicks and 40 searches, some of which will return multiple results because the names are similar enough to confuse the search.

The bad version:

• You start working through the merge sheet, opening Pipedrive records and searching for the target one by one
• On merge 15, the search returns three people with similar names and you pick the wrong one
• You realize the error three merges later when the contact you were trying to keep is now a merged record under the wrong identity

Undo is not an option in Pipedrive. You contact support.

The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI

SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook. It reads the merge pairs by ID — not by name — and runs each merge against the Pipedrive API directly, eliminating the search-and-pick error entirely.

For each row in the DuplicatePersons sheet (columns: person_id, merge_with_id), merge the two Pipedrive person records and log the result in column C.

What You Get

• Each person_id record merged into its merge_with_id record — the merge_with_id record survives
• SUCCESS written into column C for each completed merge
• ERROR written for any row where one of the IDs is not found or the merge fails, so you can investigate those specifically without losing track of what succeeded
• The sheet becomes your audit log — shareable with the team as evidence the cleanup ran

What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready

You want to preview the merge pairs before running — see what names are on each end

For each row in DuplicatePersons (columns: person_id, merge_with_id), look up the name of the person in column A and the name of the person in column B. Write both names into columns C and D so I can review the pairs before merging. Do not merge anything yet.

The sheet also has organization merge pairs and you want to handle both in one operation

Process two merge operations: for each row in DuplicatePersons (person_id, merge_with_id), merge the Pipedrive person records and log the result in column C. For each row in OrgMerges (org_id, merge_with_id), merge the Pipedrive organization records and log the result in column C of that sheet.

Some merge pairs might already have been resolved — check before merging

For each row in DuplicatePersons, check whether the person in column A still exists as an active Pipedrive record. If it no longer exists, write ALREADY MERGED in column C. If it exists, merge it into the record in column B and write SUCCESS or ERROR in column C.

You need the merge operation plus a note added to the surviving record documenting when the merge happened

For each row in DuplicatePersons, merge the person in column A into the person in column B. After each successful merge, add a note to the surviving record saying Merged duplicate contact on [today's date]. Write the note_id into column D and SUCCESS or ERROR into column C.

The pattern: merge and document in one prompt so the audit trail is built into the operation rather than something you add afterward.

Try It

If you have a list of duplicate contact pairs from a Pipedrive audit, Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and ask it to run the merges with results logged per row. See the spoke on exporting contacts for a data quality audit if you need to identify the duplicates before building the merge sheet.