Data Cleansing

Can we cleanse our addresses against additional datasets such as Mortascreen® and National Change Of Address (NCOA)?

Yes you can. We can cleanse data against additional datasets for you. Simply contact us and we can discuss your requirements.

How long will my data cleanse take?

The time taken to run an address data cleanse obviously depends on the number of records in the file being cleansed, but it also depends on the quality of the data input. You can, however, expect your file to be cleansed at a rate of up to 100 cleanses per second, or 360,000 records an hour.

My address data is badly formatted, will the address cleansing service help me?

Absolutely. The address cleanser takes the input you provide and, after making matches, returns the results according to the Royal Mail Postcode Address File (PAF®). This means you will always get consistently formatted results, even if there wasn’t consistency in the input.

Do you overwrite my existing addresses with the results of the cleanse?

No, the contact address cleansing service will simply append the matching Royal Mail addresses in columns to the right of the addresses you currently have. You can then simply choose which parts of your addresses you want to replace with those returned by our service.

What do the rankings returned by the cleansing indicate and what ranking should I cleanse to?

The address cleansing works by trying to match the components of the address submitted against the Royal Mail Postcode Address File (PAF®) database. As you will appreciate, an address which has all of the address lines present is likely to be matched, whereas an address containing just address line one and a postcode will be much more difficult to match. For this reason, we rank the results with a confidence ranking. If an address is of very poor quality, then the match we make against PAF® could, in some cases, be incorrect. “Rank A” means a very high-quality match and you can be confident the result is correct. A “RANK U” match indicates the address is so bad that we cannot find a match. We usually suggest cleansing an address against Ranks A-C or Ranks A-D, though this is down to personal preference, which is why we give you the choice.

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