CSV (Comma-Separated Values)
CSV is the lowest-common-denominator tabular format — one record per line, fields separated by commas — defined loosely by RFC 4180 and still the default exchange format for CRM imports, bank exports, and bulk operations.
The gotchas that bite
The format is deceptively underspecified: fields containing commas, quotes, or newlines must be quoted; embedded quotes double up (""); delimiters vary by locale (semicolons in much of Europe); and encoding is unspecified — Excel expects a UTF-8 BOM or it mangles non-ASCII names. Headers are conventional, not guaranteed.
Dedupe and validation are the other practical problems: real-world exports contain duplicate rows, inconsistent casing, and stray whitespace. Cleaning before import — dedupe on key columns, E.164-normalized phones, validated emails — is what separates a working CRM import from a data-quality incident.
In the payment and CRM pipeline
CSV sits at both ends of our tooling: payment CSVs feed the SEPA XML generator, MT940 statements convert to CSV for spreadsheet analysis, and the deduplicator plus email validator prepare clean files for CRM import.
Related Standards
- •RFC 4180 — Common Format and MIME Type for CSV Files
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