When you think about messy business data, what comes to mind? Perhaps an enormous spreadsheet with hundreds of rows, inconsistent formatting and columns nobody really understands.
But messy data doesn’t always look messy. Your spreadsheets can be beautifully formatted. Your CRM can have all the right fields. Your customer list can look perfectly respectable. The real question is:
Can you trust the information in front of you?
Because if you regularly have to double-check a figure, hunt through several systems or spend far too long answering what should be a straightforward question, your data may be making your business harder to run.
Here are five signs that it might be time for a data declutter.
Duplicate records are one of the most obvious signs that your data needs some attention. Perhaps the same customer appears twice in your CRM. Maybe you’ve got several versions of the same contact list. Or perhaps the same information is being recorded in more than one spreadsheet.
It might not seem like a major problem at first. But which record is correct? Which one was updated most recently? If you update one, will somebody else continue using the other?
Duplicates can quickly create confusion and make it harder to trust the information you’re working with. And, of course, they can also lead to embarrassing mistakes — like contacting the same person twice.
Sometimes the problem isn’t what’s in your data. It’s what’s not there. Missing email addresses. Blank fields. Customer records without a status. Enquiries with no source recorded. Projects without an owner or next action. One or two gaps might not matter. But when information is consistently missing, it becomes much harder to use your data properly.
Imagine you want to know which enquiries haven’t been followed up. If the follow-up status hasn’t been recorded consistently, you can’t answer the question confidently.
Instead, you’re back to checking emails, asking colleagues or relying on memory. That’s when your data stops being useful and starts creating work.
Does this look familiar?
Customers.xlsx
Customers FINAL.xlsx
Customers FINAL v2.xlsx
Or perhaps your CRM tells you that you have 126 active customers, your spreadsheet says 119 and your accounts system says 132. Which number do you trust?
It’s completely normal for businesses to use several systems. The problem starts when the same information is being maintained in different places and nobody is quite sure which one is the master. You shouldn’t have to conduct an investigation every time you need a number.
If you regularly find yourself asking, “Is this the latest version?”, that’s a good indication that your data could do with a declutter.
Where does your business data actually live?
Your CRM?
Spreadsheets?
Accounting software?
Your booking system?
Project management software?
Email?
Perhaps even a notebook sitting on somebody’s desk?
The answer for most businesses is: several of those places.
That isn’t necessarily a problem. Different systems have different jobs to do. The issue is whether you know what information is held where, why it’s there and which system you should go to when you need it.
If customer details are in your CRM, sales figures are in your accounts package and project information is in your project management system, that may be absolutely fine. But if bits of the same information are spread across all three — with a couple of spreadsheets thrown in for good measure — things become much harder.
Before you can start tidying your data, you need to understand what you’ve actually got.
For me, this is one of the biggest warning signs.
How many active customers do we have?
Where are our enquiries coming from?
Which customers haven’t bought from us recently?
Who needs following up?
Which service generates the most revenue?
These aren’t complicated questions.
But how long would it take you to answer them?
Could you look at one system and confidently give me the answer?
Or would you need to download a report, check a spreadsheet, compare it with another system, search through some emails and perhaps ask somebody else whether the figure looks right?
If getting the answer involves detective work, your data is getting in the way. And that’s important because clean data isn’t the end goal. Being able to use it is.
Good business data should help you understand what’s happening, spot what needs your attention and make more confident decisions.
If you’ve recognised your business in one or more of these examples, please don’t interpret that as meaning you need to stop everything and embark on a huge data-cleaning project. You don’t. In fact, that’s exactly what I don’t recommend.
Start by understanding what you’ve got. Then work out whether you can trust it. Then decide what actually needs your attention.
That’s the approach I’ll be taking in my FREE 3-Day Data Declutter, running from Monday 19 to Wednesday 21 October.
We’ll spend less than 30 minutes a day working through three simple steps:
Day 1 – FIND IT 🔎
We’ll look at where your business data lives and create a simple Business Data Map.
Day 2 – CLEAN IT 🧹
We’ll choose one manageable set of data and carry out a Data Health Check to spot duplicates, gaps, inconsistencies and other issues.
Day 3 – SORT IT 🗂️
We’ll decide what actually needs attention and turn what you’ve discovered into a practical Data Declutter Action Plan.
You won’t need to clean your entire CRM. You won’t need to be an Excel expert. And you definitely won’t be spending three days staring at spreadsheets.
The aim is to help you understand your data better and identify the changes that will make the biggest difference to your business. Because ultimately, that’s what this is all about:
Cleaner data. Clearer information. More confident decisions.
[REGISTER FOR THE FREE 3-DAY DATA DECLUTTER]