How to Maintain Your Housefile

When talking about building and maintaining a housefile, two issues must be addressed: collecting data into your order-processing system, and then extracting relevant subsets of this data to build a marketing and production database—your housefile.

Accurate and Consistent Input is Needed

From an order-processing standpoint, one of the most critical steps is to ensure that you have a system in place to input the data accurately and consistently. Automate as much as possible to minimize keystroke errors. One way to do this is to print account numbers on the back of the catalog and on the order form, which you later can use to quickly access the customer record as an alternative to having to enter a full name and address.