FAQ — ListMatchGenie

The most common questions, with short answers and links to deeper explanations.

About the product

What does ListMatchGenie do?

Match records between two lists (or find duplicates inside one list), clean up messy data, and generate analytical reports about the matches. The three-stage pipeline is Cleanse → Match → Insights.

Marketing ops, sales ops, data teams, compliance teams, and anyone who regularly needs to reconcile lists of people, companies, or products. The free plan works for occasional personal use; paid plans scale with volume.

Is there a free plan?

Yes, genuinely free — no credit card required, no trial expiration. Limited to 1,000 source rows per match, 5 jobs per month, and no AI questions or premium exports. See Plans and pricing.

How is it different from Excel VLOOKUP?

Excel does exact matches. ListMatchGenie does exact and fuzzy matches (handling name spellings, nicknames, abbreviations, ZIP variations, phonetic similarities). Plus it scales to hundreds of thousands of rows without the spreadsheet crashing. See the comparison page.

How does it compare to WinPure, DataMatch, Match2Lists?

More accessible pricing (free + $29 starting), no annual-contract minimums, AI-powered narrative reports, and GDPR-ready by design. See the comparison index.

Matching

How accurate is the matching?

On well-formed data, typically 90%+ precision and 80%+ recall at default settings. Accuracy depends on data quality (signal strength in the columns) and profile/threshold choice. See How matching works.

Can I match two files with completely different column names?

Yes. Map source columns to master columns explicitly on the Configure step. See Field mapping.

What happens to my original data?

Nothing. Uploads are never modified. Cleansing runs on a separate cleansed representation; exports include both original and cleansed values. See Cleansing report.

Does ListMatchGenie work for non-US customer data?

Yes. Twenty regions are supported today with native handling of each country's naming conventions, postal codes, and diacritics: US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Poland, Mexico, and Brazil. Each region has validated handling of particles (von, de la, da Silva), compound surnames, diacritics, and local postal-code formats. See Supported regions and Handling international names.

What about Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Arabic names?

CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) and right-to-left scripts (Arabic, Hebrew, Persian) are on our roadmap but not yet in the product. They present unique engineering challenges — name-order conventions, transliteration ambiguity, script composition — that deserve dedicated product work rather than a rushed implementation. We'll ship support when we can do it as well as we handle the current 20 regions. Indic languages (Hindi, Bengali, Tamil), Thai, Vietnamese, and Finnish are also on the roadmap.

Can it handle Spanish files where one column has the full name with 4 or 5 parts?

Yes. Spanish and Portuguese files frequently have a single column containing 4–5 name tokens (e.g. María Isabel García López Hernández). The engine recognizes this pattern, identifies which tokens are given names vs. paternal/maternal surnames, handles particles (de la, del), and matches correctly against a master file with separate first_name and last_name columns.

Does the engine understand two-surname conventions?

Yes. Spanish and LatAm customer lists typically use paternal + maternal surnames (García López). The engine treats the paternal surname as the primary match key while using the maternal surname as a secondary signal — so María García in one file matches María García López in another without false positives.

What about regional diacritics — umlauts, accents, Scandinavian Å/Ø/Æ?

Handled region-by-region. German ä/ö/ü/ß fold per convention (Müller ↔ Mueller). French and Spanish accents fold to base characters (García ↔ Garcia). Scandinavian Å/Ø/Æ use region-appropriate conventions (Åke ↔ Ake in Swedish; Søren ↔ Soren in Danish). Polish ł/ń/ś/ż fold cleanly. Each region module ships with a validated diacritic-fold table.

Does fuzzy matching produce false positives?

Yes, inevitably at some rate. The two-threshold system (match + review) surfaces borderline cases for you to decide. Pure precision (no false positives) requires a higher threshold and accepting lower recall.

Data and security

Where is my data stored?

In regional S3 buckets (AWS): US, EU, or UK. You pick at signup. Your data never leaves your region. See Data residency and regions.

Is my data used to train AI?

No. The Genie sends aggregate statistics to the AI provider, never raw rows or cell values. The AI provider contractually cannot train on your data. See PII and security.

Yes. We're a data processor under GDPR, with a standard DPA, in-region storage, DSAR and deletion tooling, and breach notification within 72 hours. See GDPR.

Can I delete my data?

Yes. Any individual file from the Files page. Any match job from Jobs. Your entire account via email to support (we coordinate a full GDPR-compliant deletion).

Who has access to my uploaded data?

Only users you invite as team members. No ListMatchGenie staff accesses customer data without an explicit support ticket authorizing it.

What encryption is used?

TLS 1.2+ in transit, AES-256 at rest (S3 SSE and EBS-level encryption), bcrypt (cost 12) for passwords.

Pricing and billing

What currency is billed in?

Set at signup based on your billing address: USD, EUR, GBP, CAD, AUD, or JPY. See Currencies and tax.

Is VAT/GST handled correctly?

Yes. Stripe Tax calculates and collects applicable taxes. EU B2B with valid VAT number gets reverse-charge (no VAT on invoice). See Currencies and tax.

Can I get a refund?

Yes for accidental upgrades (within 24 hours), service outages, or duplicate charges. Not for "we didn't use it as much as expected" — cancel to avoid future charges.

How do I cancel?

On the Billing page, click Cancel subscription. Takes effect at the end of the current period. Data stays accessible on the Free tier afterward.

Can I switch from monthly to annual?

Yes. Annual is 17% off. Switch on the Billing page — the switch takes effect at your next renewal.

Features

Can I automate matching via API?

Not currently. API access is planned for Business+ plans. For now, matching is UI-driven.

Can I have a team of more than 5 people?

Business plan includes 5 seats. For 6+, contact sales about Enterprise. See Managing your team.

Yes. Shareable links give read-only access via tokenized URL, with optional password protection. See Sharing reports.

Is there an SSO / SAML option?

Yes, on Enterprise plans. Contact sales.

Can I export to formats other than CSV/XLSX/PDF/PPTX?

Not currently. JSON and Parquet are planned. See Exports explained.

Can I match more than 500k rows in one file?

Business plan caps at 500k source rows per match. For larger, contact sales about Enterprise (custom limits).

Troubleshooting

My match rate is really low. What's wrong?

Usually one of: wrong profile, threshold too strict, master doesn't contain the source's records, or the identity columns are sparse in one side. See Troubleshooting.

My upload is being rejected.

Likely one of: file too large (tier cap), format not supported (only CSV, TSV, XLSX, XLS, pipe-delimited), or macro-enabled Excel (blocked for security). See Supported file formats.

Cleansing destroyed my account numbers.

Your account-number column was probably detected as "number" and had leading zeros stripped. Override the detected type to "identifier" on the Upload step.

The review queue is huge.

Either your threshold is too strict (raise the match threshold) or your data has lots of near-duplicates (run a dedupe pass on the master first).

Troubleshooting — specific errors and fixes
Glossary — term definitions
Quickstart — the five-minute walkthrough