--- title: "Choose a company matching tool you can defend" summary: "Evaluate company matching on your records. Download a scorecard for identifier conflicts, unresolved rows, evidence, coverage, controls and pricing." canonical_url: https://entitybind.com/guides/entity-resolution-buyers-checklist last_updated: 2026-10-15 copy: full --- # Choose a company matching tool you can defend > Evaluate company matching on your records. Download a scorecard for identifier conflicts, unresolved rows, evidence, coverage, controls and pricing. Canonical page: https://entitybind.com/guides/entity-resolution-buyers-checklist Last updated: 2026-10-15 For the team that owns a company master and has to defend it. An entity resolution evaluation should show which company records a tool joins, which it keeps apart and which it cannot decide. Use the same labelled file for each candidate and inspect the decisions and their evidence before comparing cost. Download the buyer scorecard to record what you checked. - Reading time: 7 min read - Sections: 5 - Questions answered: 2 - Key takeaways: 4 The same measurement, on your rows: A first file is a few hundred of your own rows with the matches you already have beside them. The numbers in this article come back measured on your data, and we write nothing to your systems. [Start free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) Self-service. Create your workspace online and verify your email to start matching company records. Free starts with 300 credits and no card. Paid monthly plans are available in workspace Billing; VAT is added where applicable. Usage is tracked without automatic overage charges. [Trust and security](https://entitybind.com/trust) A stewardship queue, a CRM after a migration or a merger, a supplier file before a payment run, counterparty onboarding that has to survive an audit. Read the argument here, take the takeaways at the foot into your next vendor conversation, and send us a file when you want the same measurement on your own rows. Foundations · 565 words · every figure carries the population it was measured over By [James Rooney](https://entitybind.com/about), founder of Entity Bind · Last revised 15 October 2026 ## Agree what counts as one company Write down the unit your team needs: legal company, establishment, group or account. A parent and a subsidiary can share an address and website while remaining different legal companies. Entity Bind resolves companies and organisations; people, bank-account ownership and sanctions screening need their own tools. - Retain a source-system name and the original source ID on every row. - Label a small, representative review set independently. Include known duplicates, distinct siblings and genuinely ambiguous rows. - Keep that review set separate from any records used to tune the matcher. ## Inspect matches, conflicts and unresolved rows Ask each candidate to return accepted, rejected and unresolved outcomes with their reasons. Count correct accepted matches separately from the share of records decided automatically. A low error count obtained by returning almost everything unresolved has a different operational cost from a high-coverage run. Questions to answer with the same evaluation file: | Check | Evidence to request | | --- | --- | | Identifier conflicts | A same-name pair with different valid identifiers, including the issuing register. | | Parent and subsidiary | Two legal entities sharing a group domain and registered office. | | Ambiguous record | An unresolved outcome and the next field your steward should investigate. | | Cluster safety | The final groups, not only independent pair scores. | | Quality | Accepted-match precision with reviewed counts, coverage, uncertainty and the evaluation population. | ## Reopen a decision without the original operator Ask a colleague to trace one merge from the output back to its source rows, identifiers and evidence. Check the source date, licence and whether a receipt can be retrieved later. Find out whether the receipt explains a historical decision or can replay it exactly; these are different capabilities. - Test one correction and confirm exactly which records and facts it changes. - Check tenant boundaries, key scopes, retention and erasure against your requirements. - Confirm that the product can cover your actual countries and input columns. ## Price the review work as well as the software Record subscription fees, metered units, deep attempts, unresolved outcomes, human review and data licences separately. Compare equivalent depth and scope. Entity Bind's [pricing page](https://entitybind.com/pricing#credit-estimator) publishes the credit rules and a scenario estimator; the estimator is arithmetic over your assumptions, not a forecast of resolution quality. - Run a repeat request and check the replay rule. - Check what happens when a plan allowance is exhausted. - Inspect an export before agreeing the handoff into your own systems. ## Record the evidence in a reusable scorecard [Download the buyer scorecard CSV](https://entitybind.com/downloads/entity-resolution-buyer-scorecard.csv). For each check, record Yes, Partly, No or Not tested, add an evidence link and name the reviewer. There is no automatic winner or weighted vendor score: a mandatory requirement that fails needs its own decision. Create a [Free workspace](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) when you are ready to inspect Entity Bind on your company file. Free includes 300 credits, shallow matching and no card. Paid plans add deeper checks; current source and assurance limits are on the coverage and trust pages. ## What to take away - Evaluate the legal-company unit you actually manage. - Review false merges, coverage and unresolved work together. - Keep source IDs and evidence attached to the decision. - Use the scorecard to document a buying decision, not to imply independent product certification. Those takeaways hold for anybody's data. The number for yours comes out of your own rows — a few hundred of them, with the matches you already have beside them. [Start free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) ## Read next Each article names its own further reading. These pick up a question this one raises and leaves open. - [What is entity resolution?](https://entitybind.com/guides/what-is-entity-resolution) (9 min read): Entity resolution decides which records refer to the same real-world thing. What it is, why company identity is hard, deterministic versus probabilistic matching, and why fuzzy matching is not entity resolution. - [How to measure entity resolution accuracy](https://entitybind.com/guides/how-to-measure-entity-resolution-accuracy) (13 min read): Precision, recall, abstention, pairwise versus B-cubed cluster metrics, Wilson intervals and out-of-fold evaluation. Why a single accuracy number for entity resolution is always meaningless, with worked arithmetic. - [Precision, recall and abstention](https://entitybind.com/guides/precision-recall-and-abstention) (8 min read): Entity resolution is a three-way trade, not a two-way one. Why abstention is a design choice rather than a failure, what an abstention has to carry to be useful, and how to measure a system that declines. Or try your own rows: create your Free workspace and upload a company CSV to inspect its results. Contact us for an assisted measurement against your labelled data, with the working handed back. [Start free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) ## Where this article is applied 2 pages name this method as the working behind what they claim. - [Audit company overlap before a CRM migration](https://entitybind.com/use-cases/post-merger-company-data-audit) (Use case): Review duplicate companies across both exports while every source ID is still intact. - [Entity Bind vs Fuzzy matching](https://entitybind.com/compare/fuzzy-matching) (Comparison): Free, already there, and perfectly good until a wrong merge costs money. ## Is this your file? The article is for anyone. The measurement behind it is worth commissioning for one kind of team. ### Built for Teams with a company master they have to defend — an MDM or stewardship queue, a CRM after a migration or a merger, a supplier file before a payment run, or counterparty onboarding that has to survive an audit. ### Wrong for Buying breadth as the product: we hold a fraction of an incumbent’s records and are not building a global company graph. Entity Bind resolves companies and organisations only. It does not resolve people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions exposure, emissions or geolocation, and its results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. ## Sources The papers, regulators and registers this article quotes, each with the caveat that travels with it. - [Entity Bind workspace signup](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1): The current self-service signup destination. It does not activate an assisted audit. ## The basis for every figure above Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. Figures read off the product repository on 2026-09-05. The per-tier rates come from the live-adjudicated 317-company recording of 2026-08-29; the gate figures come from the stub-adjudicated continuous-integration run and are a floor rather than a ceiling. The two are never averaged. Entity Bind holds no SOC 2, no ISO 27001 and no other certification, and claims none. Every figure, with the population it was measured over and the method behind both recordings, is set out on [the accuracy page](https://entitybind.com/accuracy). The retention, erasure, tenancy and sub-processor detail a security review asks for is under [Trust and security](https://entitybind.com/trust), with where assurance stands: no external validation of the accuracy figures and no customer holdout. ## The same measurement, on your own rows. Create your workspace, verify your email and run your first company file. The Free plan needs no card. Create API keys in your workspace when you need an integration. [Start free](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) · [Plans and prices](https://entitybind.com/pricing) 300 credits. No card. For a guided review of your file, explore [the Merge Safety Sprint](https://entitybind.com/audit-pack). ## The questions this article answers ### Does the buyer scorecard certify a vendor? No. It is a blank review worksheet. Your reviewers supply the evidence and decide which requirements are mandatory. ### Should every ambiguous company row be merged? No. Keep an unresolved outcome when the evidence does not settle the legal identity, then seek the missing identifier or other useful context. --- This is the Markdown copy of https://entitybind.com/guides/entity-resolution-buyers-checklist, assembled from the same data the page renders and carrying every sentence, table row, figure and question the page's main content carries. The HTML page is canonical; it adds the layout, the navigation and the interactive parts (the ask panel, the forms), which a copy can name but not run. Every page on the site, with a line on each: https://entitybind.com/llms.txt.