January is onboarding: duplicate IDs and the TSE API

The first half of January is sign-ups: patients, members, staff, credit customers. In Costa Rica the master field is still the cédula. If the form accepts it “as typed,” by February you have three files for one person and a charge that does not know who received it.

The Supreme Electoral Tribunal keeps the civil registry. ApifyConnect TSE is not civic speech: it is validate and standardize against that source so custom software is not born dirty. January 2026 also carries a specific context: 1 February is a national election. The TSE is in the public conversation; your internal register cannot improvise the same month.

What stops being optional

• Validate format and check digit, then existence against the registry — not only a regex.
• One record per person. A duplicate is a collections and support problem, not a “database” problem.
• Consent and purpose: identity to operate, not to fatten a CRM.

Onboarding done as “we will clean it later” does not get cleaned. It drags into close and into the bank.

A badly captured ID is a duplicate with an invoice.

If January already showed twin files, quote validation. It is cheaper now than in March, when electoral and commercial volume overlap.