Tidy and Merge Address Routines

The Tidy and Merge Address routines within SIMS are routines that should be run to keep your addresses up to date. It stops duplication of addresses and means that you are less likely to have issues with things such as family links and ‘lives with parent’.

Firstly, you should run the unmatchable addresses report from under Tools – Housekeeping – Bulk Address Tools – Unmatchable Addresses. This report shows you a list of addresses that cannot be matched to any existing addresses. They will probably belong to a leaver or a contact of a leaver/next of kin but will have very little information. You can choose to go in and amend these addresses manually if you think necessary or ignore them if the person in SIMS is no longer relevant and you don’t need their information anymore.

Next, you need to run the Tidy Report from Tools – Housekeeping – Bulk Address Tools – Tidy and Merge Addresses and click ‘Tidy Report’. This shows you a list of all of the addresses in SIMS that are ‘untidy’ and have things such as the county or district missing where other similar addresses have it included. It shows you all of the existing addresses and what they will change to after you run the tidy routine. For example, in the screenshot below:

The first row shows the address and any residents that are attached to it. In this case, there have never been any residents at the address so the second row shows that the address will be deleted.

Once you are happy that all of the tidy changes being made are correct, you can close down the report and then click on ‘Tidy’.

You will then see that you can print the Merge Report from the same wizard, click on this option and the merge report will then open up. This report shows all of the addresses that are the same in SIMS but have been setup as separate instances. Example below:

The table shows the two original addresses that are all the same and who is linked to each one, it is then showing the merged address so that both residents are linked to the same instance of the address.

You will need to check over this report to make sure that the merges are all correct because once the routine is run, it is irreversible and things will have to be put back manually.

Once you have done this, you can then click on merge and all of the addresses will be successfully merged.

If you are unsure as to what the routine is doing for specific addresses, can go to Tools – Setups – Address Tidy and Merge Setup to see a list of the codes for the rules that are being checked and relate them to your Tidy and Merge Reports. 

This routine may not have been done for a very long time and so the lists for both Tidy and Merge will more than likely be very long and may take quite a while to check through. Once this has been done, if it is then done on a regular basis (maybe as part of the end of year routines) the lists will be far shorter and will no longer take as much time.