How Defaqto Took Back Control of Its Dynamics 365 CE Data

Defaqto, a UK software company serving financial advisors and insurers, already had native Dynamics 365 CE duplicate detection turned on, but it made little difference. Users could click “ignore and save” past every warning. The native merge tool handled only one pair at a time and lost data along the way. As acquired business units landed on a single shared Dataverse environment, about 10% of Defaqto’s 20,000 accounts turned out to be duplicates. After evaluating several tools, including AI-driven options, Defaqto chose Plauti because it was easy to use for both admins and end users. A single cleanup job removed more than 2,000 duplicate accounts in just a few hours. Now, real-time prevention shows users exactly which record a new entry matches before they save, without blocking them or adding to the admin queue. Field-level merge rules decide what each merge keeps. Reporting now reflects Defaqto’s real customer base, and the cleanup also revealed a parent-child account hierarchy nobody knew existed.