Duplicate barcodes and names: how to find, merge and fix them so as not to break the accounting

Duplicate products in the Torgsoft software are one of the most common problems that lead to confusion in stock balances, incorrect reporting, and mistakes during inventory counts. They often appear because of Excel import errors, incorrect scanning, or when the same product is entered by different operators.

Below is a detailed guide on how to find, merge, and fix duplicates based on documentation and practical technical support cases.

1. How to find duplicates

Torgsoft has a special tool for finding such conflicts.

Tool: «Error Diagnostics»

1. Go to the menu Merchandise Management — Error Diagnostics.

2. Open the Product Errors tab.

•    Here you will see products that have the same barcode but different names. This is a classic duplication case when the same product was created twice with different descriptions.

3. Open the Warehouse Errors tab.

•    Here you can see products, the warehouses where they are stored, as well as the price and quantity for each warehouse.

Visual search in the product list

• If duplicates have different barcodes (for example, one is the manufacturer barcode and the other is an internal barcode generated by mistake), they can be found in the menu Merchandise Management — Full list of products and services or Warehouse — Warehouse Status by sorting the list by name.

2. How to merge products correctly (without losing history)

It is not possible to delete a duplicate product that already has sales or receipts. It can be deactivated, meaning hidden when the quantity reaches zero, but for product movement analysis this is not recommended. That is why the merge function is used when duplicate products are found.

Merge algorithm:

1. Go to Merchandise Management — Error Diagnostics (the «Warehouse Errors», «Product Errors», or «Product» tab) or to Warehouse — Warehouse Status.

2. Find the "correct" product (the one that should remain, usually the one with the correct name, history, and price).

3. Click the Select for merge button (or «Select product for further merge»).

4. Find the "incorrect" product (the duplicate that should be removed).

5. Click the Merge with selected product button and confirm this operation.

Please note: if you accidentally merge the wrong product items, there is no reverse procedure — you will not be able to undo the product merge operation.

What happens during merging:

• The duplicate product is removed from the list.

• The entire movement history of the duplicate (receipts, sales, transfers) is automatically reassigned to the "correct" product.

• Important. The barcode of the deleted product is added as an additional barcode to the main product. This means that if you scan the label of the old product, the software will recognize it as the main one.

3. How to fix names and attributes without creating new duplicates

Duplicates often appear because a file was imported where the product name differed slightly (for example, "White T-shirt" and "T-shirt, white").

Bulk attribute editing:

• Use the tool Merchandise Management — Error Diagnostics — Dictionary Assignment.

• Here you can select a group of products and assign them the correct Product Type, Manufacturer, Season, Color, Material, Size, and Gender in bulk.

• If the option «Automatically change product name» is enabled in the software settings in the "Parameters" form, then when one of the above fields is changed, the product name will update automatically according to the configured product naming rule in the system.

Fixing import errors (the "*" symbol in the name):

• In practice, there are cases when after import asterisks (*) appear in the product name or the product is duplicated as a model. This is often related to matching names during import, and the software automatically added a uniqueness marker. Most likely, your product name generation rule does not include a unique attribute that would distinguish these products. For example, different products have different colors, but the Color field is not included in the product name generation rule. As a result, the software creates cards with the same name because the remaining fields are identical, and adds an asterisk to the last one.

4. How to delete unnecessary product cards (if there was no movement)

If you created a product card by mistake and there has been no movement yet for it (receipts or sales):

1. Go to Merchandise Management — Full list of products and services.

2. Find the product and click the Delete button (red trash bin).

3. If there has been movement, the software will not allow deletion. In that case, you first need to determine the reason for deletion. If it is a duplicate, use the Merge operation. If it is a product that is no longer used in the store, you can deactivate it (in the "Error Diagnostics" form on the "Delete Products" tab you can use the "Delete Product" button, and in the "Warehouse Status" form there is also a "Delete Product" button). In fact, the product will not be deleted from the system, but simply deactivated and hidden. Please note, you can deactivate only those products that have zero quantity across the Torgsoft retail chain database.

5. Prevention: how to avoid duplicates in the future

The most common cause of duplicates is incorrect Excel import and/or an incorrect product name generation rule in the system.

1. Search settings during import. In the import form, always check the Product Search Parameters tab. If you want to update existing products instead of creating new ones, make sure the software searches for the product by a unique parameter (Barcode, Article number, or Name).

2. Barcode format in Excel. When preparing a file for import, always set the barcode column to text format. Otherwise, Excel may "drop" leading zeros (for example, 050123 becomes 50123), and Torgsoft will not find the old product and will create a new duplicate instead.

3. Uniqueness check. In the menu Settings — Parameters — Product you can enable the «Check and prohibit duplicates» setting for article numbers.

4. Behavior when a barcode is duplicated. In the Product Type settings, you can define the system behavior: if an entered barcode already exists, the software can "Prohibit", "Allow", or "Ask".

Practical tip. If you have many products with zero balances that get in the way (but still have history), do not delete them. Instead, use the Deactivation function, or, if the database is very old, the Delete statistics of closed periods function (this is a service function for cleaning old data, which speeds up the work of the database).