Data & systems

Master data

The authoritative records for customers, products, vendors and organisational entities that every transaction refers to.

Incentive programmes are unusually sensitive to master-data quality because they evaluate rules across aggregated volume. A customer duplicated across three records does not just look untidy — it splits volume three ways and causes the customer to miss a tier they earned.

The practical standard is not perfect master data, which nobody has. It is a cross-reference layer that can resolve imperfect data plus an exception queue for what it cannot.

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