Why is there no out-of-the-box option to merge opportunities in salesforce?
In our org we regularly end up with duplicate opportunities due to small problems in our API integration (out of my control, unfortunately, but I am responsible for much of the de-duping -- hence my username).
Usually the opps are not perfect dupes; one of them will be the original (that the sales rep has been working on, has related activities, links back to a lead, etc). Then when the sale closes, the integration creates a whole new closed won opportunity with lots of details about the product in many custom fields. I have to clean this up by copying the field values from the new opp to the original, then delete the new opp.
Obviously a "merge opportunities" function would save me a lot of time here, so I'm considering building one with Apex/ Visualforce. What I'm wondering is, what is the reason that this doesn't exist in vanilla Salesforce? Is it a big enough issue that there is something I have to watch out for in trying to build this myself?
Plausible reason(s) of why there is no out-of-the-box option to merge opportunities in salesforce would be:
merging two Opportunities typically means merging opportunity line items as well. This would make the UI more complex than currently provided by the Merge Accounts UI; If the merge source Oppos had different pricebooks, this would be problematic if some line items from one Oppo were to be preserved as well as line items from the other Oppo
Quotes are synced to Oppos so this could be problematic as well Unlike Accounts and Contacts which are representations of entities (businesses, people); Opportunities are representative of transactions (qualified lead-to-cash). Merging Opportunities can yield too many questions in the mind of the merging user as to what state things will be in after the merge - it is conceptually more difficult to wrap one's head around than merging some obvious duplicate contacts or accounts.