Guide Explains How to Normalize U.S. Company Names for Record Matching

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A technical guide discusses why company names from different sources often fail to match exactly, since variations in case, punctuation, accents, and legal suffixes can refer to the same entity or to different ones. It recommends standardizing case, spacing, punctuation, and accented characters, and mapping legal endings like LLC or Incorporated to a separate field that records entity type. The article also explains how to separate trade names introduced by terms such as dba, aka, or fka, and why including the state in the matching key helps avoid merging unrelated businesses with identical names. It includes a sample Python function that produces a normalized key, while cautioning that such rules are imperfect and that the raw name should be retained. The author stresses that a matching key is not proof of identity and should be confirmed with additional fields.

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