Phone Format and Duplicate Management

Thank you @Lee Grisham! — I’m in full agreement here, and I appreciate this being raised (and @Carlene Johnson looping in the right folkx).

When I first started working with RE at The Putney School, we had to review phone bills and attribute long-distance calls to the correct records. That made consistent phone formatting essential, and that mindset has carried forward into how we manage data today.

We intentionally use a standard xxx-xxx-xxxx format for U.S. phone numbers, and we do not apply a system-defined phone format to our phone types—we rely on internal consistency and training instead. The ability to keep the format set to “none” is important for us.

Where this becomes challenging is that web view appears to override that choice, which introduces inconsistency that we cannot control.

This has a few downstream impacts:

Matching and lookup issues, where inconsistent formats make it harder to reliably find or match records
Data consistency concerns, which are critical in any database and especially in a system like RE
Reporting limitations, where introducing additional phone types (like international variants) fragments what should be straightforward outputs (e.g., home and cell)

As an international school with constituents from 170+ countries, we intentionally avoid creating separate “international” phone types. Instead, we aim for a consistent, internally managed format across all phone data, regardless of origin.

What would help:

The ability to fully control and enforce our chosen phone format (including “none”) without it being overridden in web view
Flexibility to apply formatting standards independent of phone type
Confidence that formatting choices will support, not disrupt, matching, lookup, and reporting

This is one of those areas where consistency directly impacts data quality, and having control at the organizational level would make a meaningful difference.