The four hygiene jobs and their cadences

Hygiene is not one job, it is four, and each runs on its own clock. Lumping them into a single quarterly event is precisely why the quarterly event fails, because three of the four want to run far more often than that. Separate them, give each its natural cadence, and the whole thing becomes a rhythm rather than a dreaded marathon.

Validate, in real time, at the door

Validation is the first job and the cheapest, and it runs continuously, the moment a record tries to enter. This is the 1-USD-per-record point on the 1:10:100 ladder, the cheapest intervention you will ever make, so it deserves the most attention. A malformed email is rejected at the form. A required field cannot be left blank. An integration checks for a match before it creates anything. Validation done well means most dirt never enters at all, which is the entire reason it sits at the top of the cost ladder, it is prevention, not cure.

Deduplicate, weekly

Deduplication runs on a weekly beat, because duplicates accumulate fast given that 80 per cent integration duplicate rate from the previous chapter. The benchmark that disciplined teams achieve is a duplicate rate of roughly 1 to 2 per cent, which is dramatically better than an unmanaged database carrying its native duplicate load. A weekly merge pass, catching the copies that slipped through even good dedupe-on-create, keeps you near that 1 to 2 per cent bar instead of drifting upward week on week. Weekly, not monthly, because a month of unchecked integration inflow is enough to bury the signal.

Enrich, monthly, and enrich last

Enrichment runs monthly: refresh job titles, update company details, correct ownership as people and accounts move. But there is a rule about enrichment that founders break constantly and pay for, enrich last, onto a clean spine. If you enrich before you have validated and de-duplicated, you are paying an enrichment vendor to lovingly update three copies of the same wrong record, multiplying the mess rather than fixing it. Validate, then dedupe, then enrich, in that order, every time. Enrichment onto a dirty database is money spent making the dirt more detailed.

Audit, quarterly

Audit is the only job that keeps the quarterly cadence, and now it has a real purpose instead of being the whole show. Once a quarter you run a full health check against your trust thresholds, the bars we will set in the next chapter, and ask whether the three continuous jobs are actually holding the line. The audit is not where cleaning happens, it is where you check that the cleaning machine is still beating the decay rate, and where you catch the slow drifts no weekly pass would flag.

Four jobs, four clocks: validate always, dedupe weekly, enrich monthly, audit quarterly. Notice what this does, it turns the dreaded annual scrub into a set of small, mostly automated motions, and crucially, each one is concrete enough to hand to an AI agent. A job with a clear cadence and a clear definition is a job a machine can run.