“Please read this guide carefully. It’s very brief, but it will help
you get the most from your TPS Screening.”
Get the most out of your data
What many TPS Screening companies won’t tell you is that your data is badly formatted, but they’ll still charge you for checking it.
At TPS Services we will only charge you for checking valid numbers.
This is a simple step-by-step guide to help you understand what kind of data we can accept and screen for you and what causes us problems (and therefore will affect your results).
Vince Costa-BarnettDirector
We can take almost anything you throw at us
We can cope with most things our customers throw at us and below are some samples of the kind of things we find in your telephone fields.
Example
| 01234567890 this is his home number |
| 01234567890 [check this with him] |
| 01234567890 (looks ok, not sure will need more £££ first) |
| 01234567890---------------------dead |
| (012345) 657897 (might be ready next Thursday) |
| (012534] 567890 |
| (0121) 23654799 – call him back (after Tuesday) |
| 01236487987 + |
All of these and more besides present no problems for us to still accurately screen your data for you, because each of these items ultimately only contains one telephone number. That means we can locate, identify and properly screen it against the TPS.
What we can't catch
There are limitations on what our system can cope with and here are some examples of what our system will NOT recognise as a valid number.
Example
| 0123456798/0123654987 |
| 013214 3213//021543214 |
| 01326548213-0132165487 |
| (0121) 23654799 (012534] 567890 |
| 01234567890---------------------01326548213 |
| 01239876541 (call after 3pm) |
In simple terms, each of these examples contains more than just one complete telephone number. When our system removes all the non-number characters, we’re left with what is effectively a list of invalid telephone numbers.
So if your data contains numbers like this, our system will simply tag them as ‘INVALID’ because it cannot properly identify it as a valid UK landline or mobile number.
We don’t charge for checking invalid telephone numbers.
This will not help you get an answer as to whether these numbers are or are not on the TPS/CTPS registers.
Warning: although our system will not be able to recognise the numbers in cases like these, when your data is returned you will still be able to dial them. So you need to acknowledge that the numbers in this format will be marked as ‘INVALID’ and will have therefore not been checked and so can neither be confirmed as on or not on the Telephone Preference Service.
What can you do to help?
If you have badly formatted data (with more than one telephone number in a single field) then here’s what you can do to give us a helping hand.
- You could delete the excess numbers from fields that contain more than one telephone number and reduce each field to one telephone number; or
- You could add more telephone number columns to your data and move the extra telephone numbers into second and third telephone numbers fields (our system can clean as many columns of telephone numbers in a single file as you like); or
- You could check the numbers yourself manually against either www.tpschecker.co.uk (where you can check up to 10 numbers a day for free) or log in to your www.tpsservices.co.uk account and run the checks there against the available credits on your account.
How will my data come back to me?
You have three fundamental choices when your data comes back to you.
- In its original unscreened format; or
- we can remove all the TPS, CTPS or FPS numbers so there is no confusion; or
- we can add an extra column and tag each number as TPS, CTPS, FPS, INVALID or OK (which means you can call it). We’ll also tell you when it was registered if we can.
Don't worry, whatever choice you make we still hold your data on file so you can re-download it as many times in as many different ways as you like completely free of charge. You only pay to screen the data, we'll store your files for up to 60 days from the date you uploaded them or the date of your last screening, which ever was the most recent.