The Scenario
You are a CRM administrator. Your company just finished migrating from a legacy system. Before the old system is decommissioned on Friday, you need to merge 60 duplicate person pairs that were created when contacts were imported twice during the migration.
You have the pairs in a Google Sheet, column A is the name to search, columns B and C will hold the primary and duplicate person IDs once confirmed. The merge needs to happen before Monday, when the sales team starts using the CRM in earnest.
The slow version:
- Open CentralStationCRM, search for the first name in column A
- Read the two matching records, determine which is the primary
- Note the IDs, switch to the sheet, type them into columns B and C
- Go back to CentralStationCRM, navigate to the duplicate record, trigger the merge
- Confirm, return to the sheet, mark the row done
- Repeat 60 times across two windows
- You walk out Friday at 7 PM having merged 41 of the 60 pairs, with the rest still live as duplicates.
The fast version is one prompt per phase.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your spreadsheet that can look up person records, write the returned IDs to the sheet for your review, and then run the merges in bulk.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type the lookup first:
Search CentralStationCRM for each name in column A and return the first two matching person IDs into columns B and C. If fewer than two matches are found, write "NO MATCH" in column B.
Review the IDs in columns B and C. Correct any rows where the wrong records were pulled. Then run the merge:
For each row where column B is the primary person ID and column C is the duplicate person ID, merge the duplicate into the primary in CentralStationCRM. Mark the row "merged" in column D when complete. If a merge fails, write the error in column D instead.
SheetXAI works through the confirmed pairs and merges each one.
What You Get
A merge log with full row-level visibility:
- Column B — primary person ID
- Column C — duplicate person ID
- Column D — "merged" for each completed pair, or the error for any that failed
The two-step flow is intentional. The lookup populates the IDs so you can verify the right records before any merge happens. Once you are confident, the merge prompt runs the batch. You are not trusting a fully automated process on destructive operations.
If five rows come back with "NO MATCH," you know exactly which names the CRM could not match and can handle those manually. The rest run without you.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Duplicate lists from migration audits are never perfectly structured. SheetXAI handles the messier cases in the same prompt.
When names are formatted differently across the two systems
The legacy system stored "Smith, Jane" and CentralStationCRM has "Jane Smith." The lookup fails because the formats do not match.
For each name in column A, if the name appears to be in "Last, First" format, reverse it to "First Last" before searching. Search CentralStationCRM for each normalized name and write the first two matching person IDs into columns B and C.
When some pairs have already been partially merged
The team merged some duplicates manually before you started this process. A few rows in column C have IDs that no longer exist.
For each row, check whether the person ID in column C still exists in CentralStationCRM. If the ID is not found, mark the row "already merged" in column D and skip the merge. For rows where the ID exists, proceed with the merge and mark "merged" in column D.
When you want to preview what will be merged before committing
You want to see the name and email of both records side by side before running the merge batch.
For each row, look up both person IDs in columns B and C in CentralStationCRM. Write the primary person's name and email into columns E and F, and the duplicate's name and email into columns G and H. Do not merge yet.
When the merge needs to happen and then be verified in a single pass
You are confident in the pairs and want to confirm each merge immediately after it runs.
For each row where column B is the primary ID and column C is the duplicate ID, merge the duplicate into the primary in CentralStationCRM. After each merge, look up the primary person by the ID in column B and confirm it still exists. Write "verified" in column D if the primary is found, or "check required" if it is not.
The pattern: use the two-step lookup and merge flow for any destructive batch operation. The sheet becomes the verification layer between what you planned and what ran.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a sheet with the duplicate pairs from your migration, then ask SheetXAI to look up the IDs and run the merges. The CentralStationCRM integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to bulk import contacts and tag them or the CentralStationCRM in Google Sheets overview.