Ideal Postcodes introduces Address Cleansing to help businesses come out of lockdown

As part of stage two easing of lockdown rules on 12th April 2021, non-essential shops and businesses are now open and running. To guarantee business efficiency, it is essential that companies review their data and ensure they’re taking steps to clean and future proof their data quality.

It has been a year since UK’s first lockdown, and the third lockdown came into place on January 6, 2021. Data decays at a rate of 20% per year, which means this is the perfect time to evaluate if you have the right processes in place and if you’re keeping up to date with data protection laws. Is your business data ready for the lift of lockdown?

Customer address data is a valuable business asset and ensuring this information is valid, complete, up-to-date and meets data protection requirements is vital. Ideal Postcodes, a UK centric and fast growing address validation service recently launched an address cleansing solution to help businesses verify, accurately format and clean up address databases.

Address Cleansing is the process of verifying, formatting and correcting address records in an existing database. Addresses are verified against authoritative national addressing agencies. In the UK, Royal Mail’s Postcode Address File (PAF) is the most trusted and reliable database. Other agencies such as Ordnance Survey supply mapping and additional national address data.

Performing an address cleanse ensures your data is complete, valid and up-to-date. It also provides uniformity and consistency to address records, as there are specific addressing elements that constitute a well formed address in the UK.

With Address cleansing, it is possible to procure additional national address datasets to enrich your database further.

In the UK, each land or property is allocated a Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) by local governments. This identifier holds all information related to a property, making it easier for local authorities, utilities and organisations to share the same data. Each property also has a rooftop geolocation, which pinpoints its’ exact location.

Other datasets include Multiple Residence, which are sub-premises situated within multiple occupancy buildings and share one delivery point, and the Not Yet Built dataset includes properties still under construction or in the planning stage. Simply appending these datasets to your database increases the amount of properties captured by a further 1,250,000.

Customer data is considered sensitive information based on data protection principles. Holding old or inaccurate customer address details could impact your business resources and costs. Performing an address cleanse ensures your address records are accurate and regulated.

Ideal Postcodes’ address specialists verify address records, correctly format addresses, complete missing address/postcode fields and enhance existing data with further UK specific datasets. As a UK centric address validation service, Ideal Postcodes specialises in this area and has committed to offering solutions uniquely for UK requirements.

Ideal Postcodes’ founder Christopher Blanchard has big plans for their address validation and cleansing services. An Address Cleansing API is on the roadmap to allow users to easily cleanse their databases, future proofing their address data quality and abiding by data protection regulations.