CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Is there a way to convert an Individual record to a Household record? I've imported some records that were intended to be Households, but came in as Individuals. I'd like to change them to correct that. I tried editing them one at a time, but the edit screen does not allow you to "promote" an Individual to Household type. I infer that I could arbitrarily do this through phpMyAdmin, but is the following sufficient?

1. Update the civicrm_contact record by changing the contact_type to Household and copying the display_name to household_name.

Seems like if it was that easy, the edit screen would allow it. Is there an issue with this update process? I guess another approach would be to export the records as Individuals that I am interested in, then import them back as Households, but then I would have 3 records all with the same name.

Another way is to MERGE the individual record into a new household record...

1) Create a new household with the desired household name.

2) Note the "contact id" values for the individual and for the newly create household. (You can find this "contact id" value at the bottom of the screen when viewing the contact where it says something like "CiviCRM ID: 2345". Also this id value is in the URL of the page where you view the contact.)

3) Manually navigate to this URL where you will merge the two contacts. In this URL you will have to replace "HOUSEHOLDID" with the id value for the newly create household and replace "INDIVIDUALID" with the id for your individual.
    http://example.com/civicrm/contact/merge?reset=1&cid=HOUSEHOLDID&oid=INDIVIDUALID&action=update&rgid=7

4) Check all boxes and merge the individual into the household.

I'll be darned.   This does work.  AWESOME.

Learn something new every day.  It even moves over emails, phone, addresses, and contributions (that's all I tested thus far).   I doubt this will work merging households into individuals.

I think its a beature, or maybe a fug.

Might be good to add a warning when contact types do not match.  I wonder what happens when you merge two contacts with different SUB types.

Perhaps it still works.

You should try it out for yourself on a test database to see what happens.

Shame. just tested on Demo with merging Org + Ind and got "Selected records must all be the same contact type (i.e. all Individuals)."

I think if we can do it such that there is a very clear warning that this can result in loss of, or at least lost access to, data then it would be a good outcome.

I third (fourth, fifth, whatever) this idea.  I have had several people ask about it (and one find a different workaround accidentally that really screwed up their database).