Annual Returns have now been replaced by Confirmation Statements. In the days of Annual
Returns, different levels of information had to be sent in for each individual involved in a
company depending on their statues e.g. if you were a Director of a company you had to inform
Companies House of your full name including middle names, whereas if you were a company
secretary you had to give your first and last name and if you were a shareholder you just had to
give you first initial and you surname.
This has convoluted records at Companies House due to the fact that if a person's name is not
exactly the same they will assume it is a completely different person. For example if you have
an individual named Brett Rupert Sinclair, who is a director at one company his full name will
have to be documented but if Brett also has shares in another company his name would be
documented as B Sinclair. Creating two different people where there is only one.
As our software downloads companies information directly from Companies House, these
duplicate entries can find their way into our system. This can create problems when dealing with
information e.g. if the wrong Brett Sinclair is selected you may transfer shares he doesn’t seem
to have for that version of himself.
Process for Resolving Duplicate People
- There are two ways to get to the Resolve Duplicate Page:
- Go to the top bar, Select All > People > People for Live Companies and there you can
click in a link by the name (resolve)
OR
- Person > Resolve duplicate person (please read the information first)
- You will then be presented with a table with every person from every company.
- If you begin to scroll you may notice that some people have been highlighted in Green or
Red
- If an individual is highlighted in Green it means that the software is positive that this is a
possible duplicate person.
- If someone is highlighted in Red, the software is positive that this is a duplicated person.
- If a person is highlighted Green you will notice that the software will tell you why it thinks
it’s a duplicate person underneath the name e.g “first and last name are the same”
- Select one of the duplicates as the Master (this is the version with the most information
e.g shareholdings, connected companies etc. )
- It is important to check if there are any details (middle names, email, residential address)
from the Secondary profile (the one that you have not selected as Master) that are not
in the Master profile, as these will have to be re-entered after you resolve the duplication. It is important to remember the main purpose of resolving duplicate people is
not to combine their details but to combine the information e.g shares, the companies
they are connected to, their dividends and so on.)
- After the Master is selected next, select the Secondary profile from the list of people.
You will notice that the version that you selected as Master has the word Master next to
it.
- Click Resolve