Manual Data Entry Keeps Causing Errors and Re-Keying

Manual entry errors are removed by building the checks into the screen where the data is entered. Required fields cannot be skipped, values outside the allowed range are refused, and known details such as a customer’s address or a part’s price are looked up, not typed. Data that already exists in another system is brought across automatically. People enter each fact once, and the system stops the mistakes that tired humans make.

Signs this is your problem

• Invoices go out wrong and have to be reissued.
• The same customer appears under several spellings.
• Staff re-type data from one screen into another.
• Someone checks other people’s entries as a regular task.
• Reports cannot be trusted until they have been “cleaned up”.
• Errors are found by customers.

Where the errors come from

• Free typing. A customer name spelled three ways becomes three customers.
• Nothing is required. The record saves happily without the one field accounting needs.
• Nothing is checked. A quantity of 1,000 where 100 was meant goes straight through.
• The same thing is typed twice. Once into the order system and again into accounting, and the two do not always match.
• Copy and paste. Rows shift, and yesterday’s figures land on today’s job.

Each error is small. The cost is in finding and correcting them, and in the ones nobody finds until a customer does.

What the software does about it

• Lookups. Choose the customer, part or employee from a list. Their details fill in by themselves.
• Required fields. A record cannot be saved until it is complete.
• Range and format checks. Dates must be dates. Quantities and prices must be plausible.
• Business rules. An order over a customer’s credit limit, or a job with no purchase order, is stopped or sent for approval.
• Calculated fields. Totals, taxes and due dates are worked out by the system, not by hand.
• Imports and connections. Data that exists elsewhere arrives automatically.
• Scanning. Barcodes and scanned documents replace typing where they fit.

Enter it once

The principle behind all of it is simple: each fact should be entered once, by the person who knows it, at the moment it happens, and then used everywhere it is needed. Every time a human re-types something the computer already knows, there is a chance of error and a certain loss of time.

How Keene Systems handles it

1. We follow the data from where it starts to where it ends up. And count how many times it is typed along the way.
2. We agree the rules. What must be present, what is allowed and what needs approval.
3. We build the screens with the checks in them. Or add them to a system you already have, where that is possible.
4. We connect the systems that share the data. So the re-keying stops.

The next step is a short, no-pressure conversation. Book a call with Lance Keene or use the form on this page.