How do you handle duplicate customer records across ERP, distributor, and sales reporting data?

I’m curious how other ERP practitioners are handling duplicate customer records when sales data is coming from multiple sources — ERP customer master, distributor reports, EDI feeds, rep files, and manual spreadsheets.

In manufacturing/distribution environments, I’ve seen the same customer show up under different names, ship-to addresses, abbreviations, parent accounts, or distributor-specific naming conventions. That creates problems when leadership wants clean reporting by customer, territory, product line, or year-over-year sales.

My current thinking is that the fix usually requires a combination of customer master governance, standardized naming rules, cross-reference tables, and periodic reconciliation between ERP and external sales files. The hard part is keeping it from turning into spreadsheet archaeology — which, as we all know, is where good data goes to wear a tiny fedora and disappear.

For those of you working in ERP, operations, finance, or reporting:
How are you managing customer duplication and distributor data reconciliation in your environment? Are you using native ERP tools, BI/data warehouse logic, manual review, third-party cleanup tools, or some kind of MDM process?

I’d love to hear what has actually worked in the real world — especially in manufacturing, medical device, wholesale distribution, or Sage/NetSuite/SAP-type environments.