Merging Disbursement Payees

At some point, you may discover that somehow an escrow payee contact was entered twice (or more) under slightly different or misspelled names. This can cause significant problems for you when working with escrow records or doing escrow analysis.

The Merge Disbursement Payees screen allows you to review all of the escrow payee names and to merge any duplicated payees into a common name.

To merge disbursement payees

Open the Finances tab in the Keystone ribbon and click Merge Payees (in the Escrow Management group).
The Merge Disbursement Payees screen appears. All the names used by your disbursements along with the escrow category they are associated with are listed in the Original pane. The Merge Into pane is empty at this point.
Review the list in the Original pane and look for Escrow Payee/Escrow Category pairs that you think should be merged.
Note which payee is spelled correctly and which one isn’t.

For example, A-1 Insurance Company and A1 Insurance Company are both listed, but you know that these two payees are really the same company. The correct name is A-1 Insurance Company, so you will want to merge the other misspelled record into this one.
Locate the incorrectly spelled payee in the list in the Original pane. To the right of that payee in the Merge Into pane, select the correct name for the payee from the drop-down list.
This will allow you to merge the incorrect one into the correct one. The merged record will then use the correct name.
Repeat step 3 for other payees.

You can merge as many payees as you need to at one time.
When you are done selecting the payees you wish to merge, click the Merge button.
The disbursements and related records for the selected payees in the Original pane are merged into the corresponding name you selected in the Merge Into name.

If an Escrow Payee is an escrow recurrent payee, the Payee name is displayed in black. Non-recurrent escrow payees are displayed in red with a gray background.

If you have two Escrow Payees that are the same but with slightly different spellings, and one of them is a recurrent payee and the other is not, the one that is not the recurrent payee should be merged into the one that is the recurrent payee. Then, if the recurrent payee has the wrong spelling, the spelling of the recurrent payee should be changed on the Escrow Recurrent Payee screen. This preserves all of the additional information typically recorded only for recurrent payees.