Merge - Combine - Copy Opportunities

[jnpurdy]

Is it possible to merge two opportunities?  The business case is that the same opportunity was entered seperately with some history on each one.  Once discovered, it would be better if both opportunities could be merged. 

I used the term copy because that is what we do for contats under tools.

And, without a third party program, of course.

Thanks in advance to the guru's who support this board.

[Cali Yang]

I'ved asked about this before and the answer was no it is not possible -- it's only possible for contacts.  but I'm interested to see if there really is a way or not...

[ghollister]

Hello,
Unfortunately, there is not a way within ACT! to merge opportunities. With contacts, the possible methods are through and import or the Copy/Move Contact Data function, neither of which can be used for opportunities. I searched add-on sites and could not find one that will merge opportunities. You may want to suggest this as feature request on the Ideas board in this forum...it sounds like it could be useful, especially with duplicate opportunities.

[GLComputi…]

Not sure I can see Sage doing this... I haven't seen it requested before, and for a small number who need it, it's a pretty complex task.

To do it generically, it needs to handling scenarios like:
* Different Statuses
* Different Record Managers
* Different Access ACL
* Different Probabilities
* Merging Products and Associations (contacts, companies, groups)
* Merging Documents, Notes, histories
* Recalculating Totals, Weights

For a specific business case you can pre-determine these and, if necessary create a bespoke add-on or do exports and re-import with something like itImport

[jnpurdy]

Well good morning Mike.

You always do a great job in explaining issue in details that make a lot of sense.  I guess it is a lot like the difference in knowing where to put in the gas (me) and what happens when gas goes through the car's system to produce motion (you).

[GLComputi…]

When most users request what they think is a simple function, they only think about their specific need (as you might)

For Sage to add it, they need to look at all the different scenarios that other users might need ... then look at how much work (cost) and how many would use it. Then see if it's worth doing.

When they miss scenarios (like missing the country code in phone fields or bad time-zone handling from Outlook sync and Mobile Live), they may make some users happy but will upset many more who try to use it.

The reason I posted above was to say that, while Greig's idea of suggesting it is good, unless a huge number of users add Kudos and comments, I wouldn't hold your breath

If you need it, I'd contact Pat Egen or Stan Smith (who have contact de-dupers) and see if they might look at how much work to add to their product with just the functions you need... or if you can convince them that there are enough users who need it to add the functions to their commercial products. If they think there might be lots of sales, they might not charge as much :-)

[pbuchtmann]

John,

You could copy and past from the histroy to the correct opportunity or purchase a copy of Oakmerge as it can do this if you have a lot to do.

[GLComputi…]

How is copy and pasting history items the same as merging opportunities?

[GLComputi…]

I've added some more thoughts on this here:
http://blog.glcomputing.com.au/2011/01/how-are-product-management-decisions.html