We have a wealth of experience of matching bill/benefits and also supporting documents such as discount letters and disability review letters as part of the annual billing process.
Our recommended matching rules are summarised below. We always ensure that each client has a detailed document matching specification ensuring that we meet the authoritiy's requirements exactly, for example we may add a secondary check upon the address line 2 to ensure that not only are we initially matching on the unique identifier (Matching on account reference is adopted as the only truly secure method of matching the bill and benefit notifications) but we're also checking that a secondary match is in place, by verifying that they are for the same address.
Letters within a file - i.e. bills including previous year bills.
For these we read in the full data file and identify the number of separate letters, required fields such as account number, bill date, bill type etc are extracted and used to index the letters. They are then given a unique pack number and at this point we match together letters of the same account number but can also apply rules such as only matching where the name of the recipient or the first line of the address matches. This avoids packing together bills for split bill payers etc...Once we have matched and assigned the unique pack numbers we apply any mail sortation markers while ensuring that within each pack the order of the letters is maintained.
Letters from multiple files - i.e. bill and benefit letters.
These follow the initial steps as above, within each file we identify the unique packs, once that is done we apply criteria for matching, i.e. bills with multiple bill payers are marked for non matching so that the benefit letter which would be for only one of the payers is not seen by the other. We then pull together the bills and benefits which qualify and have matching account numbers, they are generally sorted to place the bill first followed by the benefit letter. Depending on the number of pages involved some of these may get split into a "bulk" file as those packs would otherwise disqualify the entire batch for any postage discount. The new packs are given new unique pack numbers and the remaining separate bills and benefits are also renumbered. At this point each of the files go through the final stage of mail sortation to ensure maximum postage discount.
We operate a belt and braces approach to the enclosing process via Barcode enclosing, as well as utilising weigh checkers through the enclosing process which reject any packs that appear to be heavier than a standard pack.
The barcode matching system is the industry standard when intelligently enclosing mail packs of this nature. All of our intelligent machines are fitted with a scanner to "read" the barcode, this initially ensures that the sequence number is correct, it then checks whether it is the correct page number of that pack to ensure no pages are missing. Once the personalised documents are verified and on the mailing track the barcode then drives the "Selective Insertion" whereby inserts can be dynamically driven i.e. Cash bills receive a DD mandate whilst a DD bill doesn't.
We have dedicated Quality Assurance (Q.A.) teams on all sites who are continually 'dip checking' jobs and the Account Managers also play a key part in approving and signing off the first run of the packs every time the job is ran.
As we are fully accredited and operate to ISO9001/27001 alongside various industry standards we work within, we always strive for 100% accuracy. Like any organisation, people form a major part of our operation and we're recognised as having one of the best induction, on-the job and revision skills set-up within the industry. We are therefore extremely confident in our systems; testament to this is our number of longstanding customers.