When you disconnect one Practice Management (PM) integration and connect a different one, Vinyl treats each system as a separate source. This means contacts synced from your new PM system will be brought into Vinyl as new records, even if those contacts were previously imported from your old system.
Why duplicates cause real problems
Contact duplicates aren't just cosmetic clutter, they break the core value of connecting Vinyl to your PMS in the first place.
When a client exists twice in Vinyl, here's what goes wrong:
Meeting history gets split. Meetings recorded before the switch sit under the old contact record. Meetings after the switch sit under the new one. There's no single place to see all meetings for that client, you lose the continuity that makes the integration valuable.
Notes sync to the wrong record. When Vinyl pushes meeting notes to your PMS, it matches on the contact it knows. If you have two records, notes may file to the duplicate rather than the canonical client record your team actually uses.
Client view is fragmented. Anyone looking up a client in Vinyl may see a partial picture, missing the historical meetings that were tagged to the old record. For a firm that relies on Vinyl for client context before meetings, this is a significant gap.
What happens when you switch PM systems
Vinyl treats each integration separately. It does not automatically link contacts from the old PM system to the new one, even if they look the same. For example, if you previously synced contacts from XPM and now connect Karbon, Vinyl will import those contacts again and treat them as separate entries.
How to prevent duplicates before switching
The cleanest approach is to remove your existing synced data before you connect the new system. When you disconnect a PM integration in Vinyl, you'll be given the option to remove all synced contacts, clients, and groups from that integration.
Choosing this option clears out the old integration's data so that when you connect your new system, everything imports fresh with no duplicates.
To do this when disconnecting:
1. Go to Integrations
2. Find your current PM integration and click Disconnect
3. When prompted, choose Remove all contacts, clients, and groups from this integration
4. Confirm the removal
5. Connect your new PM system, it will import cleanly with no duplicates
Note: This only removes data that was synced from the integration, it does not affect contacts or clients you created manually in Vinyl.
Already have duplicates?
If you've already switched and are seeing duplicate contacts, you can manage them manually in Vinyl or contact support for help. We can guide you through a clean-up and help ensure your meeting history is correctly attributed going forward.
Switching tools should feel simple, not messy and we're always happy to help if something looks off.