Merging Lists — Assigning Codes

We can tag each record with SOURCE and/or LETTER codes. For each file that comes in, we can assign different "hard coded" values.

Once multiple files are merged, you'll be able to select by the assigned coded

Parsing, Correcting, Standardizing

• Breaking name lines into four fields & adding personal titles.
• Fix-up and format Postal & Zip codes.
• If your data file contains no country field but does contain Canadian and/or US records, our software determines the country based on State/Province codes and the format of the Postal/Zip code field. It assigns USA or Canada.
  We've seen many instances where the city and province are Canadian but the country says 'USA'. We fix that by dropping the existing country if it's 'Canada' or 'USA' and allowing the software to re-assign the correct country.
  If your data contains various countries with various spellings, our software can standardize those to a common spelling and provide a 3 digit country code. Here's a list of United Kingdom misspellings we fix.
• Standardizing State and Province names.
• We also standardize some City names.It gives address correction software a better chance to correct the rest of the address.

More...

• Some lists don't have a field for the State/Province or the field isn't fully populated. We can add province codes based on the supplied postal code. It's not perfect but it's better than allowing address correction to perform the task by itself because there's only so much that address correction can do.
• Convert accented characters to non-accented equivolents if needed. We can also, of course, keep the accented characters as they are. The reason you might want to remove accents is: if you're printing on a device such as an impact printer that can't print accents.
• Salutation creation: Some clients wish to print the first name of the person as in 'Dear Bob,'. Often, the first name field contains extra unwanted information or may not be suitable for such a salutation.
• Company name detection in name and street fields is an important function in our software. Corp, Assoc, Agency etc. are the triggers to move this data into the company field.
• Do you need to remove duplicates? Our merge program performs a quick check by last name and Postal Code to determine if there are any dups. If the number is high enough, it means you should probably do a duplication check before using the data.