Merging Employee Records

Merging two patrons who are both employees requires two steps:

• You must merge the employee record first. This has the effect of changing all the records where the changed by, entered by, printed by, etc in the first employee to be the employee that you merge into.
• Then you can merge the patron records, since one of the patrons will no longer have an employee record.

 

Why must two patrons who are employees have their employee records merged first

The rule is that you cannot merge an employee into a patron. The reason is that every record in the system it tagged with one employee's name or another for the various entered by, changed by, sold by, printed by (etc) fields -- and deleting the employee would leave a referential integrity problem -- records would have missing data.

 

What if I want to eliminate somebody as an employee

As mentioned above, you can't simply delete the employee record to make them a non-employee.

Normally you would edit their employee record and set a resigned date. This means they can no longer log in while preserving a history of what they changed in transactions - as required for PCI compliance.

However, should you really need to remove an employee record created in error (or who resigned decades ago), there is a simple trick you can use:

• Select all the people you don't want to have an employee record on the employee list.
• ALSO SELECT YOURSELF (or some other template user)
• Merge the selected people together INTO YOURSELF

Effectively you are just assigning all the changed by information from these employees to be yourself. Then it removes person as an employee.

Once they are no longer employees, you can merge the patron records.