What Is An “Excluded Address” Or An “Excluded Apartment Address”?

An Excluded Address, also called an Excluded Apartment Address, is one which matches a known apartment or business building, but which has obvious problems with the suite number. In particular, these addresses have a suite number which is not part of any of the known valid suite number ranges found in the Canada Post reference data.

Starting on January 17, 2011, Canada Post began publishing new reference data known as Point of Call (Range Based) Address Data (PoCAD). This new reference data is more granular than the traditional reference data, known as Postal Code Address Data or PCAD. The PoCAD data has much more detailed information than the PCAD data including, for the first time, valid suite ranges for most apartment and business buildings that have their own unique postal code.

In order to avoid a sudden drop in the measured quality of mailers’ address data, caused solely by having better reference data for matching, Canada Post has instituted a transition phase, which will extend to December 31, 2011. During this transition phase, mailers will not be penalized for having an address that was previously considered valid under PCAD data analysis, but which is now known to be non-correctable using PoCAD data analysis. These bad apartment/unit numbers will be flagged and counted as excluded addresses or excluded apartment addresses (sometimes also called “invalid excluded”) records in the Statement of Accuracy report. You should make every effort to correct addresses categorized as excluded addresses because nCode will have to start counting them against your accuracy score at the end of the transition period mandated by Canada Post.

nCode indicates that an address is an excluded address by way of the status code. With the nCode Batch Processor, a status code of “NX” indicates that a record is an excluded record. Note that after the transition period ends, nCode will no longer categorize such addresses as “NX”, instead they will simply become “N” – non-correctable.

The excluded address rule was introduced by Canada Post in January 2011 and was first implemented in nCode version 10.0.

Why Are There So Many Different Terms For This Same Concept?

There can be confusion due to the fact that this one concept has at least three different names. This comes from the history of the excluded address rule. Before the rule became official on January 17, 2011, Canada Post referred to these addresses as “invalid excluded”. As of January 17, 2011, Canada Post changed the official name of these addresses to “Excluded Apartment Addresses” and this is what was to be reported on Statement of Accuracy reports. In May of 2011, Canada Post moved the original end date of the transition period from August 1, 2011 to December 31, 2011. They also required the label reported on the Statement of Accuracy to be changed from “Excluded Apartment Addresses” to “Excluded Addresses” to reflect the fact that some of these addresses may be businesses and not just residences. (Yes they really made us release a new build for that.)

Update:

On November 2, 2011 Canada Post announced that the transitional period for large urban business addresses will be extended to January 2013. This does not apply to apartment addresses. As of January 13, 2012, invalid apartment addresses will count against your accuracy score. Invalid business unit numbers will continue to be excluded until January 2013.

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