3 key steps to ensuring your data is clean

Businesses of all sizes are starting to clue up to the fact that data is becoming more and more important for business success. Data can tell you exactly who your customer is, their shopping or usage habits, what they like to engage with on social media and so much more. 

But as the saying goes: Rubbish in, rubbish out. The insights you glean from data are only as reliable as the data itself. So how can you make sure your company’s data is clean?

Here are 3 steps that are key to creating and maintaining data integrity.

1.     Lay the foundations

It’s important to lay good foundations when building a house, and a business is the same. Before launching something new, make sure that you’ve got all the key data points uploaded correctly onto all the systems you use, whether that’s simply the backend of your ecommerce platform, or it’s a more sophisticated ERP system. It’s also worth saving an offline copy of your key data points, which can act as a master list if anything goes wrong later down the track. This can save a lot of headaches later, when trying to reconcile information from multiple sources and time frames to understand how a new product line or marketing campaign has performed.

2.     Build good habits

A lot of data issues arise for small businesses when processes are not maintained. When things get busy It’s easy to neglect the activities that don’t result in immediate rewards. However, it’s crucial to build good habits and routines in order to take your business from “reactive” to “proactive”. Build time into your weekly/monthly schedule to download and review sales and marketing reports, and update key data points that might flow from the course of doing business. This way you can keep an eye on your data and spot issues as and when they arise and fix them quickly. If your systems are not connected, this can be even more crucial to success. For example, make sure inventory holding in Shopify is updated whenever a wholesale order comes through from Xero so that you don’t accidentally sell something twice! Building in regular stocktakes is also important for staying on top of your inventory data.

3.     Integrate systems

Look for opportunities and business solutions that allow you to operate different business functions or processes using the same system. For example, instead of managing wholesale orders through “offline” order forms and invoicing through platforms like Xero, consider upgrading your ecommerce platform (such as Shopify) to include the wholesale order management functionality. Similarly, make sure any Facebook Ad accounts and CRM systems that you are using are linked with your Google Analytics account, so that all the systems are talking to each other and you are receiving the same information no matter where you look. It can be very confusing if your social revenue amount is different depending on which platform you are looking at and can often be solved easily by reviewing data attribution and integration.

The world of data integrity and analysis can often seem overwhelming for retail start-ups and SMEs, but if you can look past the jargon and invest up-front in the right tools and processes, you will be able to make business decisions built on insight instead of assumptions.