CRM & Cleaning · Membership organisation
Six years of neglect, cleaned ahead of schedule
6,000 records in Capsule CRM that had not been maintained since 2018. The client did not know which contacts were still real, and neither did their reporting.
The problem
A membership organisation had been adding to their Capsule CRM for six years without any maintenance pass. Nobody had left, nobody had been merged, nothing had been verified. The database had become an archive rather than a working list.
The visible symptoms were the usual ones:
- Members who had lapsed years earlier still counted in totals, so reporting overstated the active base.
- The same person appeared more than once after being re-added through a different route.
- Email campaigns were going to addresses that had stopped working, quietly damaging sender reputation.
- Nobody trusted the numbers enough to make decisions from them.
What we did
- Full export, kept untouched
Everything out of Capsule including custom fields, tags and created dates. That file was never edited — it was the rollback if anything went wrong.
- Establish what “current” means
Six years of records cannot be judged without a rule. We agreed the test with the client in writing before touching a row, so relevance was a defined standard and not our opinion.
- Standardise before matching
Casing, phone numbers to a single format, organisation suffixes stripped. Duplicate detection is worthless until identical values actually look identical.
- Verify every address
Each email checked so the client could see what proportion of their list was still reachable, rather than discovering it through a bounce rate.
- Remove, merge, and log
Obsolete entries removed, duplicates merged so the surviving record kept the most complete value from every field. Every change logged so any decision could be reversed or questioned.
The result
A reviewed, deduplicated and verified database of 6,000 records, delivered ahead of the agreed deadline. The client got a working list and, just as importantly, a written definition of what counts as current — so the same backlog does not rebuild.
Cleaning is the easy half. A database only stays clean if somebody agrees the rules and writes them down. We hand over the standardisation rules and the tag taxonomy with every cleanup for that reason.
Last reviewed 28 July 2026. Figures are taken from the delivered project record. Client names are withheld where no permission to name has been given.
Questions
About this project
How much of a six-year-old database is usually still usable?
It varies widely, but contact data decays at roughly 22-25% a year, so a list untouched for six years will have lost a large share of its reachability. On one audit we found 51.4% of the database was unusable. We report the real figure before touching anything so the client knows what they are paying to keep.
Do you delete records or just flag them?
Whichever the client prefers, agreed before we start. Default is to flag and merge rather than delete, because deletion cannot be undone and a record that looks obsolete may carry history somebody needs.
Does this work on Capsule specifically?
Capsule, HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho, Pipedrive, GoHighLevel, ActiveCampaign, Keap, or a spreadsheet. The platform changes the export and import mechanics; the method is the same.
What does a cleanup of this size cost?
Deduplication and verification starts at $250 for up to 2,000 contacts. A 6,000-record database with six years of backlog is quoted after we have seen an export, because the amount of work depends on how inconsistent the data is, not just how many rows there are.
Have a similar problem?
Send a sample of your data. We will tell you what is wrong with it, what it would take to fix, and what it costs — before you pay anything.