Tip #38: Find Empty Companies in Your Account

A CRM can accumulate a lot of information over time. The people and companies you interact with today will likely not be the same in six months or a year. It’s a real chore to keep your list of contacts tidy, and one of the common questions our support team receives is . . .

I’m cleaning up my account, and I need help removing companies without any contacts. How can I find all companies without any contacts?

The answer involves several steps at the moment because there isn’t a filter to locate companies without any people contacts right now. As always, there is a workaround using a contact export, Excel, and a contact import.

Here’s how it works

First, you need to identify the empty companies:

1. Export all your contacts from your account in CSV or Excel format. This link can help.
2. Open the file in your version of Excel.
3. Remove all columns except the Company column.
4. Highlight the column, choose Conditional Formatting > Highlight Cell Rules > Duplicate values from the Excel options.
5. Choose the option to Format only unique or duplicate values for duplicates and fill in with the color of your choice.
6. Check the column to see any rows that aren’t highlighted. These are your empty companies.

An example of these steps:

Follow these steps in Excel to identify empty companies.

Once complete, follow these steps to update these empty companies with a tag in Highrise:

1. Add a Tags column next to the Company column in your file.
2. Enter the value empty-company in any rows for any non-duplicates.
3. Remove all highlighted rows or duplicates from the file, leaving only the empty companies.
4. Import this file and choose to bulk update the existing contacts.
5. Once completed, filter by the empty-company tag and delete the contacts.

An example of how this process might look:

Update your existing contacts with a new tag, filter by it, and delete empty companies.

If you’re not using Excel, a good alternative to consider is using Google Sheets. There are add-ons (like this one) that can be used to remove duplicates.

Wouldn’t be easier if a filter existed to find companies without any people?

Of course, and that’s something our team is working toward in the future for all standard and custom fields in Highrise. Please stay tuned. Some fields are easier to workaround than others at the moment, for example, finding contacts without an email address.

Questions or need help cleaning up your account or deleting empty companies? Please don’t hesitate to contact our support team. We’d love to help.