Business-focused custom software

Occasionally a customer will tell me that they don’t want to validate the data being entered into a form or page. Sometimes they think there aren’t any rules for the data. And sometimes they are concerned about the additional cost. Here are some reasons why improving the quality of the data will actually save you money:

Future assumptions

It is easy to think now that there are no rules about the data you are capturing. But months or years later, you may start making logical assumptions about that information that aren’t really true. For example, you may assume that every contact record has a name and address. When you prepare to do a mailing, you’ll think you need 1500 envelopes because that is the number of contact records you have. But without any data validation, 20% of those records might be missing a name and address. Now you’ve wasted money buying envelopes and stamps you don’t need. And you probably didn’t catch it until after you printed out all your labels, wasting additional funds.

Bad data clean-up

Now that you’ve printed all those blank labels, you realize that the existing database should be cleaned-up. So you’ll end up wasting employee resources to correct the faulty data. And keeping the data clean will cost additional money. Why not just spend a little up front to prevent people from entering bad data in the first place?

Security

Especially for data entered in browsers over the web, this is an important concern. The more restrictive you are on the data that is entered, the less likely that some nefarious bad-guy won’t use some trick to take over your site. And if your security is breached, you can believe that you’ll spend money on correcting the problem.