How to improve data accuracy

In such a fast-paced market, businesses need to be constantly making decisions to keep up with competitors, optimise efficiency and stay relevant in the digital world. Many businesses will rely on data to guide these decisions and provide insight into how the business could be improved, how it is currently performing and what is going well. If this data is not accurate, your business may end up making poor decisions that could cause major problems and threaten your success.

The accuracy of your business data is vital and should be a key focus when considering your strategies and workplace practices. This article will guide you through exactly what is meant by data accuracy, why it’s so important and how to improve data accuracy for your business.

What is meant by data accuracy?
Data accuracy refers to the extent to which your records are free of error and portray an accurate representation of business performance. Ideally, data with high accuracy could be used to make business decisions with no other investigation or contemplation needed.

Data accuracy directly affects your quality framework and will have knock-on effects on all other aspects of your business. For high data accuracy, your business data must be error-free, up-to-date, relevant and correctly interpreted. The two most important factors of data accuracy are content and form. Form refers to the type of data (questionnaires, statistics, etc…) and content refers to the data itself.

Why should businesses use accurate data?
In the world of online business, information is key to knowing how to make the right moves and stay competitive in the market. Making the right moves in business will lead to:

– Increased profits
– Lowered costs
– Improved customer experience

With such important aspects of your business at stake, it is vital that all information available to your business paints an accurate picture and guides effective decisions. Data accuracy has many benefits for any business and could save you from making an incredibly poor business decision.

Effective decision making
Effective decision making is essentially making moves that improve aspects of your business, such as customer experience or efficiency. The more effective decisions you make, the more competitive your business will be. Highly accurate data provides those making the decisions with confidence that their decisions are correct, which will increase business efficiency and mitigate risks early on in the process.

Improved productivity
Not only does data accuracy affect decision making, but it also contributes to workplace productivity. Accurate data makes it far easier for employees to do their jobs without having to spend time fixing errors in data. With assured data accuracy, your staff can focus on other aspects of the business.

Lower costs
Any business that has made a poor decision as a result of inaccurate data will know that these wrong moves come with high costs. Poor data quality can lead to decisions that reflect badly on business quality, credibility and efficiency. Ensuring high data accuracy will help you to avoid running into costly problems.

Marketing
Data accuracy plays a role in digital marketing campaigns as data is often used to choose who to market towards. Having accurate data will ensure that you are advertising to the right audience, which will save you time and money in the long run.

How to improve data accuracy
Data accuracy is clearly an important topic for any business, so how exactly do you improve data accuracy?

Find inaccurate data sources
The first step towards improving data accuracy should be to pinpoint any inaccurate sources that are leading to bad data outputs. Inaccurate sources could be internal or external and could occur at any step in the data process. One common source of inaccurate data happens in the data entry process when employees may enter incorrect values into the system due to simple human error. This can be improved by automating your data input process to highly trained AI.

Any inaccurate data sources should be improved or taken out of the data system so that they no longer affect your data output.

Do not overload
Data overloading is the act of putting too much pressure onto a data entry team, causing them to rush their work and make more errors. Managers should spread tasks out evenly, give staff adequate breaks and set realistic goals for data entry staff. Alternatively, businesses could invest in technology that will take charge of the whole data entry process and give the staff more time to focus on other areas of their work.

Set accuracy standards
For the highest data accuracy, businesses should set data accuracy standards that must be met by any data that is processed into the system. Data accuracy standards include data profiling, data monitoring, data linking and matching. Having these standards ensures that all data used conforms to predefined standards which will improve data quality.

Double check data
Even with the best data entry practices in place, there are still opportunities for errors to occur. Businesses should incorporate a process of double-checking and regulating all data to thoroughly check for an error before it can be used. This could be done manually or you could invest in specialist software to check data automatically.

How can Draycir help to improve data accuracy?
At Draycir, we provide businesses with solutions that improve their efficiency, productivity and decision making. Our solutions could help improve all areas of business by giving small, repetitive tasks to technology and allowing staff more time to focus on other, more important areas. Our software is specially trained to handle various business tasks and can complete administrative tasks far quicker than traditional staff, with far fewer errors along the way.

Spindle Document Management
Our Spindle Document Management systems offer complete control of documents coming in and out of your system. Spindle can hugely reduce human error that is often made when filling out forms and documents, which can help to improve the accuracy of your data. Spindle is specifically designed to work with Sage, but can be used along with other software integrations too.

If you would like to know more about how document management systems can help to increase the accuracy of your business data, get in touch with our team today.