Data is the lifeblood of the modern business. The most successful businesses rely on their data to manage daily operations and steer their future direction. However, in order to take advantage of data, it is vital to ensure its integrity. Bad data can trick businesses into making poor decisions that could potentially have catastrophic consequences. So then, how do you ensure that your data is of good quality? Well, Odoo can help with the Data Cleaning app.
Three Tools, One Clean Database
The Data Cleaning app is Odoo's solution for maintaining data consistency and integrity, with the added benefit of helping clean up storage by removing bad data. The app achieves its goal through three key functions: deduplication, recycling, and formatting.
Deduplication: One Record, One Truth
Deduplication is the first and most easily explained of the data cleaning functions. As can be inferred from the name, it is simply a tool for merging duplicate data records into a single record. This merging also allows for fixing and consolidating variations across duplicate records, such as conflicts in field entries. Users can set rules to determine:
- What constitutes a duplicate record
- How it should be handled
- Whether deduplication can be performed automatically or must be manually activated
Recycling: Clear Out the Clutter
Recycling data is similarly straightforward: it is cleaning up old, outdated data. Just like with deduplication, whether a record should be recycled and whether it can be done automatically is determined by user-defined rules. While determining how long a record can exist before being recycled is necessary, any other metric you can normally use to filter records can be applied to record recycling. And recycling data does not have to mean deleting it. If historical records are important to retain, the recycler can be set to archive data rather than delete it.
Field Cleaning: Consistent Formatting Across the Board
Finally, formatting, also known as field cleaning. This can be used to update record fields with consistent formatting. A good example of this is phone numbers on contact records. Different users might enter phone numbers in different formats, such as:
- 123-456-7890
- (123)456-7890
- 1234567890
The field cleaning feature can update these various entries into one preferred standardized format. Other common uses of field cleaning include trimming excess spaces, fixing the casing of text, and cleaning HTML formatting. As with other data cleaning tools, users can set rules for when and how field cleaning should run, and whether it can do so automatically or must be manually activated.
Ready to Trust Your Data Again?
Having advanced tools that you can utilize for your business can do wonders for improving your workflow efficiency, and Odoo is a full suite of advanced business tools. The Odoo Data Cleaning app is only one of these tools that our Navigate team can help you put to work. If you'd like to learn more about what Odoo can do for your business, reach out to us here at Lighthouse IT Solutions. We'd love to give you a hands-on demonstration of everything Odoo has to offer.