When deduping (merging) contacts in Apsona there are some helpful details to know. Apsona, like Salesforce, merges the contact, but not the Account. NPSP has automation that renames Household accounts to "Anonymous Household" when the last remaining contact is removed from that account. If you use Apsona or Salesforce to merge a lone contact from one Household into another, that household account will be orphaned and NPSP will rename it to "Anonymous Household". If you merge a contact from a Household where there are other contacts, the household will be renamed by NPSP according to your Household naming settings, but it will not become "Anonymous Household".
NPSP also has its own merge tool that will merge the contact and DELETE (not merge) the non-master account. But this tool is only useful for deduping one set of duplicates at a time, not for bulk deduping as Apsona can do.
Two options for you while using Apsona are:
1. You can first merge the Household accounts for the contacts that you intend to merge. There are many ways to identify households that need to be merged. This webinar shows some ways to do this. After merging the accounts, you would then merge the contacts. This will avoid renaming orphaned HH accounts as Anonymous. This will also avoid deleting any important information on the non-master account that is important for your business processes. This is our suggested approach.
2. If you do not have important info on the non-master HH account, and you are ok deleting it after the contact merge, you can simply merge the contacts, allow the HH to be orphaned and renamed "Anonymous", then you can then set up a saved filter in Apsona on the Account to find Anonymous HHs and do a mass delete. You'll want to review your anonymous households after merging the contacts the first few times you use this approach, to make sure you aren't losing important unique information on the account when you delete them.
If you've already taken steps to dedupe contacts and you are left with Anonymous Households, and you need to dedupe the anonymous Household into the master account, you can use a feature in our Dedupe tool called "CSV File as record source" and manually choose which non-master accounts (ie" Anonymous Households") should be deduped into which masters.
NOTE: In some cases, if the non-master contact is the "Primary Contact" on multiple opportunities, all but one opportunity will move over with the contact to the new household. One opportunity sometimes remains tied to the original Household, even though the primary contact is updated to the new master contact. This is a known issue that Apsona's engineering team is working on. Until this fix is completed, you may need to take an extra step to manually move these remaining opportunities to the new account before deleting the Anonymous Household. If you use our suggested approach of deduping Accounts first, this issue will be avoided.
NOTE: If you have Nonprofit Cloud, or another data model that includes Person Accounts, see this article.