| Spring is here according to the calendar. Although, with snow on the ground in many parts of the country, it may not feel like it. The arrival of spring prompts many of us to start thinking about doing some spring cleaning. Included in your spring cleaning should be a review of your financial information. Here are a few things to think about cleaning up. |
| When entering transactions, it’s easy to enter, as new, the name of a customer or vendor that may already exist in your database. This creates a duplicate of that name and may make it difficult to find transactions related to that name. Having duplicate names also skews the numbers when performing an analysis of the business you’ve conducted with that person or company. In CenterPoint, you can easily go into setup and combine duplicate entries, making it easier to find transactions for that name. |
| Another example is one that I recently completed with my personal data. Since I started keeping my personal records in our software (November 1987), I have had separate accounts (subaccounts) for “dining out” and “school lunches” under a “meals” account. Since I have not paid for a school lunch in over 25 years, it’s probably unnecessary to separate those expenses. Not a big deal, but it makes my data a little cleaner. |
| Of course, it’s also the end of a calendar quarter, and that’s always a good time to take a look at how your actual business is doing compared to the budget you created for the year. (You did create a budget, didn’t you?) Also, it’s good timing to check inventory that you have on hand against the information in your accounting program. |
| I’m sure you can think of several other things that can be completed as part of your spring (data) cleaning. |