Repairing records at the CRM import boundary

The challenge

Records enter a CRM from forms, imports, and integrations in whatever shape the source sends. Cleaning them after the fact is a recurring project; the fix is to repair at the boundary.

Data before & after

{
  "email": "JANE@doe.io",
  "phone": "415.555.0142",
  "website": "doe.io",
  "country": "usa"
}

{
  "email": "jane@doe.io",
  "phone": "+14155550142",
  "website": "https://doe.io",
  "country": "US"
}

The workflow

1. 1Send each inbound record to Repair before it is written to the CRM.
2. 2Validate email and required fields; hold records that fail hard checks.
3. 3Write the normalized record, or route held records to a review queue.

Capabilities used

Implementation

Call Repair from the handler that receives inbound records. Treat validation failures as a hold signal and route them to a review queue instead of writing them.

curl -X POST https://zapinner.com/api/v1/validate \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ZAPINNER_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "record": { "email": "JANE@doe.io" } }'

Technical architecture

• Repair-at-the-boundary keeps the CRM clean without a recurring bulk cleanup job.
• Hard validation failures become a review queue, not a silent drop.
• Idempotent requests make retries safe if your import job restarts.