You’ve heard this IT cliché repeatedly: garbage in garbage out. This saying is so true particularly with reports.
As the title of this article suggests, the Achilles heel for any report is always the data. 97% of all report related tech support requests we receive are due to data issues and not the report logic. If your data is bad, you will have equally bad report results. No way around this paradox.
And no, changing the report logic to compensate for the bad data is not the answer especially for production reports used by all merchants. Perhaps you may consider a custom report to manage your bad data issues, but eventually your custom report will fall prey to the same bad data issues. The custom report will require constant updates and adjustments which means it will be costly.
Bad data is rarely limited to a single report. Any report relying on the bad data will be adversely affected possibly eliminating the use of entire sections of reports. The best way to fix this issue is to fix the data.
Let me give you a simple example of how bad data can affect a report. Let’s say you are filtering a report by country. The 2-digit ISO country code for the United States is US and the 3-digit code is USA. Some of your data imported from a marketplace has a country code of U.S. instead of US. Anytime you filter a report by country = US then any record with a country code of U.S. will not be included in the report skewing your results.
If you change the report logic to account for U.S., then it works for that one report and no other. What happens when you have another country code issue? Do you keep adjusting the report for each subsequent country code issue like U.S.A.? With 195 countries, the country code variations would be unmanageable.
The solution is simple and most effective for all your reports. Fix the data before it arrives to your reporting database, so it is clean and consistent for all reports.
How you fix your data depends on the source. We’ll discuss this topic in another article.
Are you ready to automate your workflows to gain maximum productivity? Take a look at one of our recent projects to learn more about how we can help with your business automation, 3rd party integrations, and reporting, contact us.
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