While importing records, you can use the Skip or Overwrite option to avoid creating duplicate records. The duplicate records are identified based on a particular field for each type of record. Following are the fields for each type of record:

• Leads - Email
• Contacts - Email
• Accounts - Account Name
• Potentials - Potential Name
• Cases - Subject
• Solutions - Title
• Campaigns - Campaign Name
• Vendors - Vendor Name
• Products - Product Name

Consider the scenario: You do not use the above mentioned fields and you want to update a list of records with additional details. While importing the file with the updated records, you want to check for duplicate records.   In such cases, you can use the Record ID to check for duplicate records. Each record in  CRM has a unique ID. When you export the records, you can get their individual Record IDs. To check for duplicate records while importing, do the following:

1. Export the records that you wish to update. The exported file will include the Record IDs.
2. Make the necessary changes to the records in the file.
3. Import the file in  CRM with the Overwrite option.
   • Duplicates will be checked based on the record IDs.
   • When a duplicate record is found in CRM, it will be overwritten with the data in the import file.
   • Only the mapped fields will be overwritten.
   • If the Record ID field is not mapped, new records will not be created.