---
title: "Deduplicating a sprawling CRM and rebuilding the recurring-revenue roll-up"
type: case-study
evidence_type: proof
category: "Data Quality & Enrichment"
publisher: "LeanScale"
date_modified: 2026-08-08
word_count: 425
topics: ["revenue-operations"]
canonical_url: https://knowledge.leanscale.team/customers/deduplicating-a-sprawling-crm-and-restoring-arr-integrity/
source: "LeanScale Knowledge Hub — https://knowledge.leanscale.team"
license: "Free to quote and cite with attribution to LeanScale."
---

# Deduplicating a sprawling CRM and rebuilding the recurring-revenue roll-up

**Evidence type:** proof (what happened)

A growth-stage fintech had grown its CRM to a few hundred thousand records, with duplicates, undocumented workflows and inconsistent deal data sitting underneath the recurring-revenue roll-up. LeanScale rebuilt the data foundation and the reporting that sits on top of it.

## The challenge

The company had outgrown its CRM: a few hundred thousand company and contact records riddled with duplicates, a thicket of undocumented and overlapping workflows, and no agreed definition of deal type or contract value. Three mechanics in particular meant the recurring-revenue roll-up could not be relied on: related accounts rolled up independently of each other, a workflow fired after close and overwrote the deal amount, and churned accounts still carried closed-won records. Sales, marketing and finance each reconciled the numbers their own way.

## The approach

Property audit and a data dictionary
Audited every contact, company and deal property along with its workflow dependencies — pulling the workflows object through the API to map what actually fires — deprecated stale fields, re-grouped properties, and published a source-of-truth data dictionary giving each field a definition and an owner.

Deduplication program
Stood up Dedupe.ly with multi-key match rules and ran company and contact duplicate reports across the full base, then merged duplicates in bulk.

Parent–child hierarchy
Designed parent-to-child company associations so recurring revenue rolls up once across related accounts rather than once per record, and mapped CRM record IDs to the product-side account IDs so the two systems agree on what an account is.

Closing the post-close overwrite
Traced and shut off the workflow firing after Closed-Won that was overwriting the deal amount, corrected the affected deals, aligned renewal order terms to new-business terms, and automated renewal creation, co-terms and deal-type/amount field population.

Reporting and forecasting rebuild
Rebuilt sales dashboards (closed-won by segment and period, activity, pipeline), configured the Gong forecast board with metrics and targets, and produced weekly pipeline recaps off the cleaned data.

## Outcomes

CRM base cleaned and deduped
The deduplication program was scoped and run across the full base of a few hundred thousand records. By our own delivery recap, several hundred accounts were merged in a single week at peak.

The post-close overwrite found and corrected
By our count in the delivery record, around 1,300 deals affected by the post-close overwrite were identified and corrected, and the workflow behind them was retired so the defect stopped reproducing.

Churn state reconciled to one rule
Account churn status was reconciled against closed-won records so a churned account and its revenue records agree, rather than each being maintained separately.

Reporting the org trusts
Weekly closed-won and pipeline now surface from CRM dashboards rather than hand-built spreadsheets, with win notifications pushed to the wider organization.

Embedded delivery
Delivered as an embedded team running five concurrent workstreams — property audit, dedupe, hierarchy, revenue automation and reporting — across roughly a six-month window.

## Quotes

> Think it would be great visibility for sales team and the rest of the org
>
> — Customer, Mid-market Account Executive


## Canonical

https://knowledge.leanscale.team/customers/deduplicating-a-sprawling-crm-and-restoring-arr-integrity/