Note: Running Fridays in FromGregsHead.com, is a continuing series of tips brought to you by Greg Price. These run Saturday mornings during the BusinessMaker’s Radio Show on KPRC 950AM. Audio files can be found on the Entrepreneur’s Playbook™ page of the PKF Texas website.
When was the last time you performed an audit of the various databases that your organization uses on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis? By audit, I mean when did you last really look at the values in the database to see if they make sense, given the possible answers?
Examples of the audit include:
• How many duplicate customer names or locations do you have?
• How many customers with negative balances do you have?
• How many customers have no street name or zip code?
• How many customers show that they owe you $50 or less for over 12 months?
• Do you have invalid values like negatives for quantities and accounts numbers?
Recent studies have shown that some estimates put the cost of bad data at over $40 billion in the consumer product industry. With millions of dollars being spent on reporting tools, and reporting scorecards from all types of information systems, maybe more focus on the source of data and processes used to create and store the initial data entry need s to be looked at. Remember garbage in, garbage out.