Clean data: one client, one card

Every email, chat message, and deal in Ikigai attaches to a contact by its identifiers — email addresses, phone numbers, messenger profiles. When those identifiers are missing or scattered across duplicate cards, history splits, two managers write to the same client, and reports double-count. Three habits prevent all of it.

One person — one contact card

A contact is a person, and one person should have exactly one card. The card holds everything: "Name", "Email", "Phone", "Messengers", "Company", "Position", "Owner". A contact can have several deals, so never create a second "Anna Kowalska" for a second purchase — open a new deal on the existing contact instead.

Before creating anyone, search first: the fastest check is the search field in the top bar. Global search understands names, emails, domains, and phone numbers in any format, so pasting whatever the client gave you is enough.

Fill identifiers properly

• Email: enter the full address, and add every address the client actually writes from — incoming mail is matched to the contact by these.
• Phone: store the full international number (for example, a Kyiv or Warsaw number with its country code). Search finds phones by digits regardless of spacing, but a complete number is what lets chat channels and dedup work reliably.
• A contact supports multiple emails and phones — add all of them to the one card rather than creating a twin.

Handle duplicates early

Duplicates are cheapest to fix on the day they appear:

• Global search warns you proactively: if the same email or phone is attached to several contacts, the results show a "Duplicates in the database" section with a "Merge contacts" button.
• The merge dialog suggests similar contacts automatically (shared email/phone or company), shows which card survives as Primary and which disappears, and fills the primary's empty fields from the other card.
• Merged the wrong pair? The merge can be rolled back from the record's related tab — but it is still better to look twice before committing.

Tip: make "search before create" a team rule. Ten seconds in the top-bar search is cheaper than an hour of untangling two half-filled cards a month later.

Clean cards keep your board readable too — continue with Pipeline hygiene or browse Best practices.