Rarely, will 2 lists of company names follow the same exact format or standard.
It could be Co. Ltd (or Company Limited or Co. Limited.) or Inc. (or INC. or Incorporated). These standards and suffixes varies between institutions and countries. When they do exist, more often than not, all these abbreviations and suffixes are simply found in one list and omitted in another. Makes matching company names a challenging task.
Especially if you have a large database of names to match, and some of them are duplicates
Each input file should have one column labelled as “CompanyName”
It does not require the company name to have the same format
The company name should preferably have at least 2 words (single names may not provide satisfactory results)
If the company name in either your Master file or the External file is delimited in separate columns for some reason, combine the company name (by using the concatenate function) in a new column and label it as “CompanyName”
In order to get the best results, we suggest that you only include the name of the company and no other information, if possible
We understand that this may not be possible in some cases, and believe that our application has some elasticity to absorb these variations
Please note that the Community Version has some limitations – depending on your file size, it may take longer to run
This refers to your own Constituent, Supporter or Alumni Database/File
This file can contain as many fields as you require but it must have a column labelled as “companyname” (which, as you may recall, contains the name of the company)
Ideally, there should be a “Masterfile_ID” column
The Masterfile_ID column should contain the unique IDs that you have assigned to the respective companies in your original Master Database/File
This file must be saved in CSV format
We will name the second input file as EXTERNAL file:
This refers to the External file which you want to run the search against
This file can contain as many fields as you require but it must have a column labelled as “companyname”
If the file comes with a unique ID for each name, label the column as “Externalfile_ID”
If the file does not come with a unique ID for each name, we suggest that you assign one for each name for easy reference
First, click on the Choose File button under Master File
Select the MASTER file which you have saved as CSV
Second, click on the Choose File button under External file
Select the EXTERNAL file which you have saved as CSV
Finally, click on the Upload button
If you have followed the steps for formatting and saving the files correctly, you will see the remarks “Please wait while we process the file.”
If there are any errors, an error message will appear. All files will be deleted immediately. Try again. If you’re not sure what to do after that, Contact Us
A Download option will appear – click on it
A new CSV file will be downloaded – this is the Output File
Once you download the file, all files will be deleted immediately
The difficulty with most big data matching projects is that the majority of the records do not match. Perhaps the greatest value of this system is that it automatically sieves out most, if not all, records that are improbable matches
Data varies and there are many possible permutations. As with most software (and humans), the system is not foolproof and won’t be 100%.
