How to Ensure Data Entry Accuracy: Best Practices

Data entry accuracy is essential if you need high-quality data and do not want to join the businesses that go through significant losses (USD 12.9 million per year) due to inaccurate and low-quality data. To ensure your data entry is accurate you need to have a system in place that takes care of it and guarantees precision.

Data entry is a complex process that involves typing a large amount of data into a system while making sure that every entry is correct. It usually is time consuming and feels overwhelming to go through but it’s a necessary cog in the machine.

Due to its stressful and time-consuming nature many businesses also outsource this task to a specialist virtual assistant to ensure accuracy, save time, and considerable money in one fell swoop.

However, if that is not an option for you yet, knowing the following best practices is beneficial for keeping your data entry highly accurate.

Before we jump into the ways to address data inaccuracy and how to avoid it, let’s take a look at the challenges we face while entering data manually.

The absence of clear formatting guidelines and standardized procedures, can make data entry inconsistent. Mismatched data formats, increased errors, duplicate entries, and so on can result from a lack of standardization.

Keeping entered data precise and correct is one of the biggest challenges professionals face. For data entry operators achieving high typing speed is necessary to meet efficiency and productivity demand. Often it leads to typos that introduce inaccuracy into a data set.

Data entry jobs generally involve handling tasks that are very repetitive in nature. Therefore, it can decrease the efficiency of a human mind and lead to increased errors. Monotonous tasks generally cause mental fatigue causing a decline in accuracy.

Time pressure is another element that affects work performance by introducing stress and anxiety into the mix. The constant demand for speed or pressure to meet deadlines can cause burnouts and bring some inaccuracies.

When you deal with diverse data sources or types in a high volume it becomes very difficult to maintain accuracy without specialized workflows or tools.

If you have a clear idea about the consequences of inaccurate data for a business you cannot miss on these best practices. Go through them one by one and implement anything that your team does not already have in place.

Having a clear set of instructions is the best way to ensure your contractors or employees know how to do the entries right. The rules and conventions on data entry, formatting, and validation are the data entry accuracy standard that helps one avoid problems in the long-run. Assuming everyone onboard has a clear understanding of the standard operating procedure can prove to be dangerous.

Setting up a solid data entry process and developing an extensive data entry workflow that includes data cleansing, data standardization, and data validation, is crucial. Having a standardized process in place means enhanced data quality, reduced errors, and guaranteed consistency because it lets you know the scope, the purpose, the source, and the structure of the data.

If you check the data quality before and after you enter it can help you ensure that data accuracy is maintained. It means that you have to verify the relevance, completeness, and accuracy of the data you are getting from the sources. Checking for any anomalies, outliers, or missing values is also part of this process.

To maintain and ensure data entry accuracy you should make sure that you know the nature of the data you are dealing with, where it should be placed, and what its correct format should be. The rewards for your efforts will be lesser revisions and high quality data.

Quality control measures are incomplete without regular audits. It allows you to evaluate the data you have entered into the systems. The technique of double data entry is one of the most effective techniques that help with data entry accuracy checking.

Additionally, you should use various accuracy measurements such as quality metrics and error rates to get useful insights into the general reliability of your data.

Another component of quality control is measures for error identification and correction. You can conduct regular data verification checks and compare entered data with the source and promptly correct errors if you find them.

To ensure data entry accuracy implementing data validation is a must. This is an important step in the process that identifies inconsistencies and errors and allows for correction.

There are multiple types of data validation. Most data validation will use one or more of the following data entry accuracy test before storing the data in the database:

You have to provide your data entry operator with necessary training to confirm accuracy. You should arrange a thorough training program that covers the best practices, the importance of accuracy, and the technical aspects of data entry.

Moreover, to familiarize your employees with automated tools or specific workflows you should continue to provide continual support and guidance. Data entry accuracy training is vital when it comes to developing a sense of the consequences of inaccuracies into your personnel and let them develop their own ways to handle the various stressors.

If keeping your data set reliable is something you want to prioritize, consistency in data sources is paramount. To avoid any kind of discrepancies you should, therefore, administer automated syncing, version control, access management, and implement centralized databases.

To maintain the uniformity and accuracy of data sets implementing data standardizations techniques across different data sources is crucial. Moreover, you can also use a data catalog to enhance data visibility and accessibility which in turn will help maintain a smoother workflow necessary for higher data accuracy.

Efficiency is also needed to stay accurate in data entry. Therefore, you can use advanced data entry software to make your data entry work more well-organized and energy-saving. On top of that the features like error prompts and auto validation decreases the probabilities of incorrect data entry.

You can use Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR), Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Machine Learning to automate repetitive tasks and allow your team to work on tasks that are more complex.

To prevent losing your data or getting them corrupted you have to have a strong backup strategy. To prioritize data quality you must store both on and off-site data securely.

In case of data loss you can easily restore operations if you have data recovery procedures in place. To verify that your backups are working reliably you should consistently test these and ensure business continuity and peace of mind.

Now you can start building a robust system, piece-by-piece, that takes care of your data entry accuracy. When you go through the ways and decide how to act on these you should also keep in mind that doing everything you can is not necessary to maintaining accuracy, but it is important to find out what works best for you and your business.