Clean customer data against the company register

Company details go out of date quietly. A customer moves, changes its name, or goes under, and nothing in the CRM notices. On the customers list, select the customers you want checked and choose Clean data against the company register.

What you see before anything happens. How many of the selected customers can actually be checked, how many cannot because they have no organisation number, and exactly how many register lookups the check will use. Nothing has been looked up yet at this point, so you can open this, read it, and close it again at no cost.

Then choose what the check is allowed to do:

• Only tell me what differs. Nothing is changed. Use this the first time.
• Fill in blanks only. A field nobody has filled in takes the register's value. A field somebody has already filled in is left exactly as it is. This is the default.
• Replace values that have gone out of date. The register's version wins where the two disagree.

Three things are never changed, whichever you pick.

• Phone numbers are never replaced. What the register offers is a named person's direct line, not the company switchboard, so it can fill an empty field and nothing more. Replacing a number a colleague dialled last week is not cleaning.
• The country is never touched. Your records spell it the way people typed it; the register uses a two-letter code. Swapping one for the other would be a step backwards across every customer you have.
• A customer's status is never touched. If the register says a company is bankrupt or in liquidation you are told so and the run counts them, but the status on the customer means where they sit in your sales process and that is yours to set.

Reading the result. The run reports how many customers differed from the register, how many are bankrupt or in liquidation, how many the register has no record of, and how many could not be checked at all. Every difference is listed with the old value and the new one, and says whether it was actually changed, so a first run in report-only mode tells you what a bolder one would do.

While it is running you can stop it. Everything already checked stays checked, and the record shows where it stopped. One wash runs at a time per workspace.

Cost. One register lookup per customer checked, and that is the number shown before you start. Selecting customers costs nothing, opening the dialog costs nothing, and reading an old run costs nothing.