Talking About Data

About two weeks ago I was talking to somebody at work about a database and reporting system that was set up in another part of the company. The goal was to merge our part of the company with this other part, especially in the data and reporting systems. This other part of the company is a much larger part of the company and throws off more revenue so they are able to have a more sophisticated reporting system with nice pictures and other stuff.

However, and this was what we talked about, there will be a huge hurdle because it will involve our managers to data input from one system to another. Currently, I have the managers download some reports from the system they use and my VBA program pulls the information from downloads and puts them into the reports for them. There are three main benefits to this method: 1) the managers do not have to spend time doing data entry; 2) program reduces data input errors; and 3) my Excel will signal when the numbers do not balance properly. When numbers do not balance properly that means something was not input or updated in the original system so the week to week math is incorrect (example: last week’s balance plus entries in minus entries out equals this week’s balance). This new reporting

system will entail managers doing data entry so that will be a huge hurdle: to go from something automatically doing the work for them to them doing the input.

But the selling point of this new system was that the new system can produce much more interesting charts and tables and it is connected to some marketing data. But this is still a hurdle because the new benefits are not what the managers will care about.

The problem with this scenario, and this is what my colleague and I talked about, was that under the stress of additional work of data entry, the managers will just input anything without verifying, just to get the job done. Right now, for the most part, my spreadsheet has some checks and balances to prevent them from just moving forward with erroneous numbers. There are always ways around the checks, but a lot of problems are cut down. This new system won’t do that and my colleague is concerned about that because she says that over time the numbers in the new system and the numbers in the original system (where the data comes from) will diverge greatly.

During the show and tell meeting of the new system, I asked about what they did to make sure the two systems would not get out of sync and the originator said that they have a reconciliation program that makes sure the two systems are in sync. My colleague is still dubious but at this time, that is all we have.

I just don’t know how we are going to handle the “backsliding” from automatic entry to manual data input.