When the same counterparty has been recorded under more than one name — "Acme Corp", "Acme Corporation", "ACME Corp." — merging them consolidates the records so reports, filters and the parent–child view all see one party instead of three.
Overview
In this article you'll learn:
When merging is still needed
How to merge two party records, step by step
Which record survives the merge
What merging does not cover
When You Still Need to Merge
Aline's AI now keeps contract types and parties unique as documents come in, so it no longer registers a new party record for a name it already recognises. Your parties list should stay clean on its own going forward.
You will still need to merge in two situations:
Historic data — duplicates created before deduplication, which are not merged retroactively
Bulk imports and migrations — where the same entity arrives under materially different names
A large migration is the natural moment to do this. See Bulk Upload & Large-Repository Cleanup / Deduplication.
Merging Two Parties
Click Parties.
Click the duplicate party — the record you want to fold into another one.
Open the Merge parties action on the party record.
Click Select a merge target.
Choose the party you want the records to be merged as. This is the record that survives — pick the correct legal entity name, not whichever one you happened to open first.
Click Merge. Every document attached to the duplicate now sits under the surviving party.
What Merging Does Not Cover
Duplicate documents. Uploading a file that is already in Aline does not raise a warning, and merging parties will not remove it. Duplicate documents are found and cleared through a report — see Bulk Upload & Large-Repository Cleanup / Deduplication.
Parent–child relationships. Linking an MSA to its SOWs is a separate feature, not a side-effect of merging parties. Parent–child detection is available on enterprise accounts only.
💡 Best Practices
Decide the surviving name before you start — use the legal entity name as it appears on the signed agreements.
Do party clean-up once, right after a bulk import, rather than a record at a time.
Sort the Parties list alphabetically to spot near-identical spellings quickly.
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