Data Entry Standards
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Contents |
Overview
Data entry standards serve to simplify the data entry process and ensure information is presented consistently to both internal staff, and external customers and vendors.
Consistent conventions for business and location names make finding data within the system easier, and a standard form of punctuation and capitalization ensure a consistent and professional look and feel on invoices, customer statements, carrier confirmations, etc.
Recommendations
Capitalization
Some businesses prefer to do all data entry in capital letters. This is a very simple way to ensure consistency amongst data entered into the system. The trade off is in the presentation of this data when information is passed along to customers, vendors and staff.
Businesses especially concerned with the outward appearance of their external reports typically choose to enter data in mixed-case, and follow the standard of capitalizing the first letter in all words of a proper name or place.
Names
Most records that are selected in lists in CMS have two names: the Internal Name, which only appears within the system; and the Legal Name (or some variation thereof), which appears on reports such as invoices, cheques and account statements.
This allows for some flexibility in how data is referenced in the system versus how it appears externally.
One way to leverage this flexibility is by identifying each customer with a short, unique code - typically derived from the customer's name - and entering it as the Internal Name, which is all that staff are required to enter in order to select that customer. The Legal Name then reflects the customer's actual name, and is presented on reports and other external documents.
Sorting
Lists in CMS are by default presented alphabetically. This is especially useful to note in the cases of Payable Charge Types and Receivable Charge Types, as alphabetically will not by default display the most used charge types at the top of select lists.
Prepending the Name of the most used charge types with a common character such as an asterisk (*) will make those charge types appear at the top of the select list, and make the job of data entry considerably easier.
A convention similar to the codes suggested above for customers also works with payable and receivable charge types. Many businesses with prepend charge type names with the applicable GL code, which serves to group similar types together, and simplify locating them within a list.
