Do the Job Manually

Back-matching

But manually fixing these data can be a bruising task. In the case of the example above, the data processing manager successfully corrected the data, but it took months.

There’s a better way to do this. It won’t work every time, but it’s magic when it does. It’s called “back-matching.” The first step is to save all of your mailing lists. At the end of your season, send your order file to your data processing vendor and have it compare the names and addresses of everyone who purchased with the names and addresses of everyone you mailed. For each match, insert the proper mailing code from the mail file into your order file.