Contact Duplicate Detection, OFAC Screening, and Buyer/Vendor Rules

This article covers four specific contact-record rules: the OFAC button on the contact's General tab (screening is staff-initiated, never automatic), the "Possible Duplicate(s) Found" banner (imported records only), the duplicate-buyer block on Buyer/Co-Buyer, and which Vendor-role contact pre-fills on expense entry.

Scope: this article is only about contact records — OFAC/SDN screening, duplicate contact matching, buyer/co-buyer assignment, and the default vendor. It is not about duplicate vehicles from a spreadsheet import (see Bulk-Importing Vehicles from a Spreadsheet Without Duplicates), and it is not about pulling credit — see 700Credit Setup.

Questions this answers

• "Does saving a contact run the OFAC/SDN check automatically, or does someone have to click the OFAC button on the General tab every time?"
• "I typed in a brand new customer with the exact same phone number as an existing contact and it saved with no Possible Duplicate warning. Is that expected?"
• "Can the same contact be both the Buyer and the Co-Buyer on one deal?"
• "The wrong company keeps auto-filling as the vendor on expense entry for this lot — where is the default Vendor contact set?"
• "Why does the Possible Duplicate(s) Found banner show on contacts from our Frazer conversion but never on ones we type in ourselves?"

OFAC (SDN) screening is manual, not automatic

Saving a contact — new or edited — never screens the name against the Treasury OFAC/SDN list on its own. Screening only happens when someone clicks the OFAC button on the contact's General tab.

That means a contact can be saved, added to a deal, and sold to without ever being checked, unless a staff member clicks OFAC on that record. There is no background job or save-time hook that runs the check for you.

A few details worth knowing about how the button behaves:

• For an individual, both First Name and Last Name are required before the check will run. For a business, Company Name alone is enough.
• Clicking OFAC first silently saves any unsaved edits on the contact form, then runs the check.
• For a business contact, only the Company Name is screened against the SDN list; the individual contact person's name is checked only if the company name comes back with zero matches.
• If nothing matches, the button turns green with a checkmark and records the check date. If a name is matched, the button turns to a warning state — but a name match does not automatically flag the contact. You're shown the matched SDN name and have to explicitly confirm Yes or No that it's a real match, and separately choose whether to save that the search was performed.
• If more than one possible match comes back, they're presented as a list to review one at a time, not auto-flagged.
• The OFAC check date can be tied to a specific deal as well as to the contact's master record, so the same person can show a different check date depending on whether the check was run from a particular contract.

Because screening is entirely staff-initiated, it's on your dealership to build OFAC screening into your process — for example, checking every new buyer before finalizing a deal — rather than relying on the software to catch it for you.

Duplicate contact detection only fires on imported records

If you manually type a new contact into Add Contact or Add Buyer, DeskManager Online does not show a live duplicate warning as you type or when you save — not for a matching phone number, email, or SSN. There's no popup, no red text, nothing. Two manually-entered contacts can share the identical phone number (or SSN, or email) and both save without complaint. There is also no database rule preventing it.

The "Possible Duplicate(s) Found" banner you may have seen on other contacts only appears on records that came in through an import: a DeskManager or Frazer conversion, or an imported web credit application. During those imports, each incoming record is checked against existing contacts — first an exact email match, then exact phone number and extension, then exact SSN — and if only a partial match is found, the imported record is flagged. Opening that flagged contact shows the banner with the look-alike record(s) listed by name, email, and phone so you can compare them.

The banner is informational only. It never blocks saving, and clicking Ignore simply dismisses it — it doesn't merge or change either record. If you want to catch duplicates created through manual entry, you'll need to search by phone or email yourself before adding a new contact, since the system won't do it for you.

The same person can't be both buyer and co-buyer

No — DeskManager Online blocks this. If you try to assign a contact as Buyer while that same contact is already the Co-Buyer on the deal (or the other way around), the save is rejected with a duplicate-buyer error.

One related behavior to watch for: if a Buyer or Co-Buyer is already set on an unlocked deal and you assign a different contact to that same role, the previous assignment is silently replaced rather than flagged with a confirmation prompt. Double-check the Buyers tab after making a change if you weren't expecting the swap.

Setting the default vendor for expense entry

A lot can have one Vendor-role contact marked as its default. Screens like expense entry read that flagged record and pre-fill it automatically — the lookup is scoped to the current lot and only considers an active contact marked as the default vendor.

If the wrong company keeps auto-filling, it usually means either the wrong vendor contact is marked as default for that lot, or more than one is marked at once. To fix it, open the vendor contacts for that lot and move the default-vendor setting to the correct one.

Related settings

A contact's SSN also matters outside of duplicate matching: pulling a credit report requires an SSN saved on the buyer (and on the co-buyer too, for a joint pull) before the request can be submitted. See Running Customer Credit for the full credit-pull walkthrough.

When to contact support

If a duplicate banner appears on a contact you're certain isn't a duplicate, or an OFAC check returns a result you're unsure how to interpret, contact support rather than guessing — these are compliance-sensitive records.