I keep running into the same issue with CRM imports:

Some rows are clearly fine.

Some rows are clearly trash.

But the painful ones are in the middle.

Examples:

same email, different phone

same phone, different name spelling

same company, slightly different title / city / source

records that look mergeable, but not safely

The obvious stuff is easy.

What I’m trying to understand is the middle zone.

How do you actually handle that at scale before import?

Do you:

hold them back in a review bucket

manually label them

merge conservatively

import and fix later

just accept some contamination

I’m not asking for theory. I mean your actual workflow.

I’m curious how people define “ready to import” when a spreadsheet has already gone through some cleanup.

The difficult part for me is not obvious broken rows. It’s the gray area:

duplicates that are not exact...

conflicting fields...

suspicious values..

rows someone manually edited without a clear record of why...

At what point do you trust the file enough to import it?

Do you rely on:

exact checks only

manual review buckets

another tool/workflow

experience/judgment

And what usually goes wrong even after cleanup?