How do you convert an Individual record to a Household record?

[Donald Lobo]

any folks willing to fund/sponsor this feature? With unit tests, docs, maintainance going forward etc, i suspect its a 20 hour project

lobo

[questions]

Not that my vote counts for anything but I'd like this.

Now the issue comes just how to implement such a thing.  You can't just simple switch the contact type and it doesn't seem quite right to delete the HH name (if switching from HH to ind) and then making the user enter the first and last names. One could try to parse what's in hh name and stick parts of it in first and last names.  Of course, the parse would have to be different depending on how the HH name is entered (i.e. Last, First or First Last). 

Switching from Ind to HH is probably easier. Just concatenate Prefix, first, middle, last, suffix and stick that in HH name and then delete pre, first, middle, etc.  Of course, once again depending on how people enter their hh names the results may be wrong, but it's not that much work to manually switch it afterwords.

There is the matter of greetings was well but one would hope they would be right in the first place, a note that says to check these after a switch is done would be nice.

I wonder if sort_name would take care of itself or if it would need to be dealt with as well.

Another approach might be to change the type and then expose the fields not normally exposed, e.g. HH name for ind, if that field is not null and let the user move the names around as appropriate.  Then give an error if they don't delete the data in the fields that should be null for that contact_type upon saving.

All of this is much easier said then coded, tested, etc...

[petednz]

My tuppenceworth is that it should require user to enter the First Last if converting a HH, or vv - and same for Organisation. I think the chances of getting it right via code is negllible.

[Michael McAndrew]

All of this is much easier said then coded, tested, etc...

Just to re-iterate, the key part missing here is someone willing to do the work / find the funding since otherwise we unfortunately don't have the resources to implement all the feature requests we get.

[Sean Madsen]

Just to pipe back in here -- I use the "feature" regularly. One example of a common use-case here: we have many donors will donate to us through their family trust or some similar intermediary "organization" and sometimes the data entry gets done wrong and ends up on a new organization because that's all the check says. Then later we'll realize what happened and need to merge the organization into the individual. Just did that today actually!

This feature still works using CiviCRM 4.5.1. Note that Civi won't let you perform the merge if you try to get there through the search interface. You have to manually type in the URL as I mentioned in reply #2 (four years ago... wow!).

I find this functionality to be completely safe, having never lost any data from doing it lots of times.

It would be great if Civi had an interface exposed to the user that would allow people to merge arbitrary contacts when it might be difficult or impossible to construct a search that will display both of them. For example, when viewing a contact record, I could click "Actions" and then "Merge with another contact".

[The Doctor]

Thank you Sean! I just used this on 4.5.3 to merge an organization with an individual. It works.

One of my members accidentally made her membership renewal contribution "On behalf of an organization" and in the process created a new organization record. Since hers was not an organizational membership, I had to find a way to associate that contribution and membership with her rather than the non-existent organization. Soft credit was not going to cut it.

Interestingly, once the merge was complete, her record showed the Organization as her Employer. Clicking on the name of the organization led right back to her record. I was able to edit and remove it without a problem.

Since others have said this does not work, I wonder why it worked for me. Perhaps because she had a permissioned relationship with the organization? Or just a relationship? More testing needed. If it doesn't work for you at first, try creating a relationship between the contacts. They try making that a permissioned relationship.

Perhaps all that's needed is an interface that allows us to simply enter two ID numbers to merge the contacts, regardless of type. This could be added at the bottom of the "Find and Merge Duplicate contacts screen." If I knew how to program, I would do it.

Anyway, as always, thanks to everyone who works on CiviCRM and contributes to these forums to help us users.