Yesterday I had a discussion with one of our Beta Testers, who was confused about what to do when their reference dataset had two Company Name fields and they were unsure which one to match against. I thought it might be a good idea to address this here.
In short, if you have multiple company names you should be using them during the matching process, as either of them could exist in the list you are matching to.
Legal Names and Trading Names
Surprisingly it’s not that uncommon to have multiple company names within a dataset. Typically these are Legal Business Names for accounting purposes and Trading Names for commercial reasons. A good example of this would be TGI Fridays – its legal name is Wetherspoons (as of Aug 2009).
A great example is the D&B worldbase file, this has a Company Name and a Trading Name – see the example image below.
Multiple Versions of the Same Name
Another common reason for multiple business names being stored is the use of acronyms. There are lots of well known acronyms and many not so well known.
Here are just a few of the most common.
- GM – General Motors
- GE – General Electric
- BBC – British Broadcasting Corporation
- 3M – Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company
- HP – Hewlett Packard
How do we manage multiple company names in Match2Lists?
Our philosophy is to create simple solutions to complex problems, so when using Match2Lists all you need to do is identify/describe your company name columns within your lists. Match2Lists will automatically use the best Match from any of the Company Names from within your list.
