Disclosure at the top since it's relevant: I work at Veridion, we do company data, and I mention one of our tools at the bottom. The method below works with any registry source and I've named a free official one too.

Most CRM dedupe runs on company name and fuzzy matching. It half-works, which is worse than not working, because it merges genuinely different companies with similar names while leaving obvious duplicates alone. Acme Inc, Acme Incorporated, ACME INC, and Acme Inc. survive as four records. Meanwhile two unrelated firms both called Meridian Consulting get merged.

The reason is that a company name is a description, not an identifier. Companies change names, trade under names they aren't registered under, and abbreviate inconsistently. There's no rule that makes them unique.

What actually works is deduping on jurisdiction plus registry number. Every registered company has a number issued by the registry it's incorporated in. It's unique within that jurisdiction and it doesn't change when the company rebrands. Store it as a field and dedupe becomes exact instead of probabilistic, and it works retroactively across records you already have.

Two other things fall out of it once the field exists:

Dissolved accounts become visible. Registries publish status. Companies dissolve, get struck off, or restructure into new entities, and none of that reaches your CRM. Most databases contain accounts that legally stopped existing years ago, and the only symptom is that outreach quietly never lands. With registry status as a field, that's a filter instead of a mystery.

Inbound gets validated at entry. Free-text company fields produce whatever someone types. A lookup at submit tells you whether the entity exists, so junk gets flagged before routing.

The trap to avoid: legal name isn't trading name. "Google" isn't registered anywhere; "Google LLC" and "Google Ireland Limited" are. First-pass match rates are lower than people expect. Treat no-match as "needs review," never as "invalid" - auto-rejecting on no-match is how teams quietly discard real records.

Getting the data: UK-only, Companies House has a free official API and it's good, use that. For multi-country, ours is at [registry-lookup.com] - searching on the site is free with no account, and there's an API at 5,000 lookups a month free if you want to automate the dedupe. Any registry source works, the method is the point.

Curious what percentage came back dissolved, because the numbers I've heard vary enormously and I don't trust my own sample.