A tenant calls in October asking why part of her deposit from the old unit was kept. You open her profile. It shows the new lease, a clean payment history, and one note about a parking space. The move-out photos, the note about the broken blind, and the date you mailed the itemized statement are all on a second profile with her old email address, which you do not think to search for until she has already hung up.
Nothing was lost. It was split. On the phone, that feels the same.
How the second profile gets there
Duplicates rarely come from carelessness. They come from ordinary events:
- The tenant applied with a work email and signed the lease with a personal one.
- You added her by hand in a hurry, then imported the old spreadsheet a month later.
- A renewal or a move to another of your units got entered as a new person.
- A co-tenant was typed in twice, once from each lease.
Matching on email catches the cases where the address is the same. LeaseRooster flags those. The different-email case only surfaces when somebody notices two profiles with the same name and phone number, so look for them on purpose now and then. Scan the tenant list by name, a page at a time, and look for pairs.
What a note should say
A note is for the next person who reads it, and that person may be you in three years, a property manager you hire, or a judge. Write for all three. Put the date first, then what happened, then what you did.
| Instead of this | Write this |
|---|---|
| Complaining about the door again. | 2026-03-04: tenant reported the back door lock sticks. Locksmith booked for 3/6. |
| Seems unreliable, watch her. | 2026-05-02: May rent received 5/9. Late fee charged per lease. |
| Nice family, lots of kids. | (Nothing. This is not a fact about the tenancy.) |
The rule under the table: dates and facts, never characterizations. And nothing at all that touches a protected class, meaning a person’s race, color, religion, sex, national origin, family status, or disability, plus any class your state or city adds. No comments on an accent, a church, a pregnancy, or a health condition. Those notes do not help you run the unit, and they read badly in any dispute.
Requests for a disability accommodation are the one place a protected class necessarily meets the file. Refusing a reasonable accommodation when a person with a disability needs it for equal use of the home counts as discrimination under the Fair Housing Act (42 U.S.C. § 3604(f)(3)(B)). Record the request, the date, what you asked for if anything, and your answer with its date. Leave out any commentary on the condition itself.
Tags that earn their keep
A tag is only worth having if you will filter by it. Try this: for each tag, name the last time you pulled up the list of everyone carrying it. If you cannot, delete the tag.
Tags that usually pass:
autopayandpays-by-check, for the week rent is duemonth-to-month, for anyone off a fixed termkey-on-fileorgarage-remote, for move-outcosigner, so the guarantor gets copied on the right lettersformer-tenant, to keep the active list short
Tags describe the arrangement, never the person. A pet on the lease can get a tag, because it is a lease term. An assistance animal is not a pet, so do not tag it as one. It belongs in the accommodation note described above.
Saved views do the rest. A view of month-to-month tenants in one building is a renewal list
you do not have to rebuild each quarter.
What merging two records does, and what it does not
When you find a pair, merge them. In LeaseRooster you open the duplicate, choose the record to keep, and confirm. Know what happens before you click:
- Moves to the kept record: the duplicate’s leases and notes. If only the duplicate has a portal login, that moves too.
- Is deleted: any document uploaded straight to the duplicate’s profile. Download those first and upload them to the record you are keeping.
- Stays where it is: screening requests, which stay with the application they came from, and message threads, which belong to the lease or the portal login.
- Is refused: a merge where both records have a portal account. One of them has to give up portal access first.
A merge cannot be undone, so read the name on the record marked kept before you confirm. The step-by-step lives in the merge duplicate tenant records help article.
Start clean if you are importing
The cheapest duplicate is the one that never gets imported. Before you bring a tenant spreadsheet into any system, sort it by email, then by phone, and collapse the pairs by hand. The import tool shows a preview before it creates anything, which is the moment to catch the ones you missed.
If you are still deciding whether the spreadsheet has to go at all, a landlord CRM against a spreadsheet, job by job is the honest comparison. Once the list is clean, the tenant records in LeaseRooster keep one profile per person, with notes, invoices, work orders, and messages on a single timeline.
This is general information, not legal advice. Rules change and local ordinances vary. Confirm current requirements with your city, county, or an attorney before you act.