Table of content

Upgrades in the demographic sales report
Upgrades in the tire storage list

1. Upgrades in the demographic sales report

1.1. General information about postal code in Canada

The Canadian postal codes are a 6 alphanumeric code. In Canada, we alternate between digits and characters using the following format: "A1B 2C3".

Note that there's a space between the two series of alphanumeric characters (the "forward sortation area" and "local delivery unit").

So,

K1A 0B1 is the postal code of the main office of "Poste Canada" in Ottawa
G1G 4C7 is the postal code of V2V Quebec city office
H0H 0H0 is Santa's postal code in Canada

It is interesting to know that there are almost 800 000 postal codes in Canada.

1.2. Forward sortations areas (FSA)

The first three characters in the postal code are referred to as the "forward sortations areas" which represent a geographical region.

The first letter represents the "postal district". Each province has it's own postal district except the Ontario which has 5 different postal districts, the Quebec has 3 different one and the Nunavut and the Northwest Territories.

Quebec and Ontario have more than one population due to their large urban agglomeration (by example Montreal or Toronto).

Here's a map showing our different postal district in Canada

• Newfoundland: A
• Nova Scotia: B
• Prince Edward Island: C
• New-Brunswick: E
• Quebec: G, H and J
• Ontario: K, L, M, N and P
• Manitoba: R
• Saskatchewan: S
• Alberta: T
• British Colombia: V
• Nunavut and Northwest Territories: X
• Yukon: Y
• The digits represent a zone. A 0 represents a large rural region while other digits represent an urban region.

The second digit represents a small city or a large urban agglomeration.

1.3. Local delivery unit (LDU)

The last three characters represent the "local delivery unit". A local delivery unit can represent a single address or a range of address :

An entire small town or a part of a medium-size town
A district in a city
A very large building or even a portion of this building
An institution such as hospitals or universities
Or even a business that receives a large volume of mail on a regular basis (not V2V, that's for sure...)

Note: LDU ending with a 0 refer to a postal office.

Note 2: LDU of "9Z9" is used exclusively for the business reply mail.

Note 3: LDU of "9Z0" represents a large regional facility.

1.4. Example of postal codes (rural region)

For example, my father lives in Lac-Etchemin which is a small village a hundred kilometre southeast of Quebec city.

He has the following postal Code: G0R 1S0

Let's examine the first three digits:

G: Eastern Quebec
0: Large rural region
R

In short, "G0R" represents all the municipalities of the MRC* of "Belchasse-Etchemin".

• An "MRC" (Regional Municipality of County) is a group of cities representing a region in the province of Quebec.

1.5. Example of postal code (Urban region)

Now let's take Quebec city as an example,

We got

G1G 4C7 is our V2V office postal code in "Charlesbourg" (green square)

1. G1P 2X2 is my postal code in "Duberger" (green triangle)

G1V 3A4 was the postal code of my first room in "Ste-Foy" (while I was a student in colleague) - (green heart)

G1V 1M3 was the postal code of my second room in "Ste-Foy" (green star)

Now, let's examine the first 3 characters.

G: Eastern Quebec
1: Quebec city
G, P and V: Districts in Quebec city.*

• All of those were separate cities before the municipals' fusion in 2000.

1.6. List of Canadian postal code

Here's a list of all the Canadian postal codes divided by (FSA).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_postal_codes_in_Canada

You can click on a letter (FSA) to see all the postal codes in that region.

1.7. Code ZIP in the United States of America

A ZIP code in the USA is composed of 5 numerical digits.

There are four types of ZIP Code:

Unique
Post office box only
Military
Standard

Unique codes are used by governmental agencies, universities, business or building that receives a very high volume of mail.

1.8. Explanation about zip codes

The first digit represents a certain group of states.

The second and the third digit together represent a region (or a large city) in that group.

Then the fourth and the fifth digits represent a group of delivery addresses within the region (first three digits).

Note: The main town of the region often gets the first code, then the order generally follows the alphabetical order.

Note 2: Since the ZIP code aims for efficiency, there is some case when the zip code may cross borders of states.

0 = Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virgin Islands.

Army post office Europe, fleet post office Europe

1 = Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania

2 = District of Columbia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia

3 = Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee

Army post office Americas, fleet post office Americas

4 = Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio

5 = Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin

6 = Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska

7 = Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas

8 = Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming

9 = Alaska, American Samoa, California, Guam, Hawaii, Marshall Islands, Federated states of Micronesia, Northern Mariana Islands, Oregon, Palau, Washington

Army post office pacific, fleet post office pacific.

1.9. ZIP+4

There is also the "ZIP+4" which are the standard 5 digits postal plus an additional four digits to identify a specific geographic segment within the 5 digits delivery area.

Those can be:

City block
Group of apartments
the individual high receiver of mail

In general (but not invariable), each post office boxes has its own ZIP+4 code

1.10. ZIP Code prefix-list

Here's the list of all the 3 first digits combination used by the American postal service.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ZIP_code_prefixes

1.11. Group postal code together

As mentioned in my report Monday, we had to fix a limit of postal code in the charts in order to keep good readability.

In the pie chart, we display only the top 25 postal codes.

In the bars chart, we display only the top 50 postal codes.

In most of the case, one won't especially need to know the specific street where his or her customer lived, but the district in the city or the region.

For those, you only need the first two or three characters in the zip/postal code.

This is why we added an option allowing the user to set the number of digits to consider for postal codes in the chart (starting from the left to the right of course...)

1.12. Example

Here's an example for which I didn't specify any digits, so I got a full length Canadian postal code (6 digits and space).

616 postal codes were no included in the chart.

Now in this example, I consider only the three first characters (forward sortations areas).

In that case, only 28 postal codes weren't included in the charts.

Note: If you specify the number of digits, we will remove the space in the postal code so it won't be considered as a "digit" and bring confusion with the Canadian users.

1.13. Search for specific postal code

What would be a demographic report if you cannot specify a postcode condition to narrow your search?

There are three ways you can use this criterion:

Begin with: The postal code starts with the specified string.
Contains: The postal code contains the specified string.
Complete postal code: If you are using the Canadian postal code format, you must not forget the space in the middle of the postal code.

You probably also noticed that there's a magnifying glass button right beside the textbox.

If you click on this button, the GEM-CAR will display the list of the code postal code or zip code depending on the language the user is running the GEM-CAR.

French:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_codes_postaux_canadiens

Canadian English:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_postal_codes_in_Canada

US English:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ZIP_code_prefixes