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Deep Dive: Validating Mailing Addresses
Deep Dive: Validating Mailing Addresses

Learn some of the ins and outs of address validation (especially state names and abbreviations) within QuickBooks and Novi AMS.

Pete Zimek, CAE avatar
Written by Pete Zimek, CAE
Updated over a week ago

Address Standardization in Novi AMS

Powered by Google’s Places API, Novi AMS provides users with auto-complete functionality for addresses. Available to both admin and traditional member users, this functionality greatly improves the quality of data and the user experience overall. The functionality will help to standardize and clean your data, but it does not guarantee that it is a fully validated address.

Addresses in QuickBooks

One of the reasons that Novi cannot fully validate addresses is that QuickBooks does not have validation within their customer address fields. As an example, a QuickBooks user could list one customer in "FL", one in "Fla." and another in "Florida." All three would be accepted by QuickBooks, and all three would be synced back over to Novi.

To help ensure consistency, we highly recommend that QuickBooks users follow a standardized approach to adding address data.

USPS standard: Auto-complete is not auto-validation

If your association is creating a mailing list of any substance, we recommend that you run those addresses through a United States Postal Service (USPS) address validator. This additional check is necessary for a number of reasons. First, there is no warranty from Google that the addresses supplied are USPS-validated. Additionally, users can override Google’s suggested text. Lastly, there are multiple ways in which address data can make its way into your Novi database, including a QuickBooks sync and the import from your legacy AMS technology.

State Name & Abbreviation

Many associations build reports and groups based on state names. To help ensure that these are correct, it is important that the underlying data be consistent. Without full validation on the state field, significant responsibility falls on users to follow solid naming conventions. We recommend that you use either the USPS abbreviation or the entire state name spelled out.

To build the query for a particular state, you'll want to add a condition group similar to the one below. Remember to toggle to "or" so that the group or report contains records that have the full state name OR the abbreviation.

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