Canadian Postal Products September 2016 2016.09

Release Notes This document contains information about September 2016 release. Complete documentation is located at our support site.

Contents:

Summary 2 Benefits 2 Features 2 What’s New 2 Conclusion 2

UNITED STATES pitneybowes.com/software Technical Support: support.pb.com

CANADA pitneybowes.com/ca Technical Support: support.pb.com

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Summary

There are three individual Canadian Postal Products covered in this release note: Postal Points File, Six-Digit Points and Forward Sortation Area (FSA) Boundaries/Points.

The Canada Postal Points File is a nationwide point database of every postal code in Canada. The six-character postal codes are linked in the Canada Postal Points File with all levels of the 2011 standard census geography. This is done by establishing a link between the FSALDU (Forward Sortation Area Local Delivery Unit) and the Dissemination Area (DA).

The following four fields are extracted from the Canada Postal Points File referred to above, in order to create the Six- Digit Postal Code Points file: FSALDU, FSA_LDU, Latitude and Longitude.

The Forward Sortation Area (FSA) corresponds to the first three digits of a Canadian six-digit postal code, designating a postal delivery area.

Benefits

The Canada Postal Points File is a great way to enable businesses to locate their customers on the ground via the postal code. Pitney Bowes further enhances that postal code by linking it to the smallest level of census geography, the Dissemination Area (DA). Businesses can then use that DA to associate information such as income or neighbourhood characteristics to target their prospective customers.

The addition of the multiple postal codes provide alternate postal code coordinates and linkages to standard Canadian census geographic codes to supplement the single most representative coordinates (and Census geography linkages) for .

Features

The September 2016 vintage of Pitney Bowes’ Postal Points File contains 985,128 total postal code records. This file is developed by Pitney Bowes using the TomTom® Postal Point (PL) Layer File and information from . 869,917 of these postal codes are unique and 115,211 are multiple. The Canada Postal Points file contains over 900,000 postal codes geocoded to the street level. These postal codes are current to September 15th, 2016.

What’s New

There have been 5,287 unique new postal codes added to this vintage of Canada Postal Codes.

Pitney Bowes is continuing its efforts to enhance the coverage and representation of the Dissemination Areas (DA). The focus of these efforts is to ensure that the populated DAs in Canada are represented in the postal code concordances. Furthermore, Pitney Bowes Software remains committed to continually improve the quality of postal code records (both unique and multiple) in the file.

In addition to improving the coverage and representation of DAs, Pitney Bowes is working to provide the most up-to- date Forward Sortation Area (FSA) boundaries in Canada. Due to a restructuring of L0L and L0R, customers will notice the addition of two new FSA boundaries, "L8B" (Waterdown, ) and “L9X” (Minesing, Ontario). The total number of FSAs in Canada is 1,645.

Conclusion

Canadian Postal Products, especially the Canada Postal Points File, are valuable tools which allow businesses to facilitate the mapping and demographic analysis of customer records. A full user guide for these products can be found in the document entitled– Canadian Postal Products. If you have any questions regarding your subscription, please contact the Customer Service Department at 800.552.2511.

Canadian Postal Products Release Notes - September 2016 2