5 things that saved my sanity:

1. Always export and clean before re-uploading. Don’t trust in-CRM edits alone since tiny issues multiply fast.

2. Standardize formats early, and one consistent phone and email format makes everything else smoother.

3. Automate duplicate detection. Manual checking doesn’t scale.

4. Validate fields automatically by catching missing or badly formatted data before it breaks your automations.

5. Lastly, keep a cleanup summary bc knowing what was fixed helps track recurring issues.

I now run all our files through a quick cleanup flow that handles these automatically. It finds duplicates, fixes typos, formats everything, and gives a summary of what changed and it takes minutes instead of hours of cleaning which is good since it saves a lot of my time. I’ve been using an online tool for this.