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Clean Up Your Dirty Data with DataMaid by Novi AMS
Clean Up Your Dirty Data with DataMaid by Novi AMS

Learn how to connect, run and clean-up your dirty data!

Jenn Norman, CAE avatar
Written by Jenn Norman, CAE
Updated over 4 months ago

Are you tired of dirty data living amongst your QuickBooks records?! Then it's time to clean and polish that data to a shine with the help of DataMaid, a QuickBooks Online data cleaning tool that sweeps and scans your data to identify errors and update them on the spot! 


Getting Started

  • Login:

    • Username: Enter your name

  • On the DataMaid homepage, select Connect to QuickBooks

  • Sign-in to your QuickBooks account (if prompted)

  • Select the account you would like to connect

  • Select Authorize to share your data between QuickBooks and Datamaid

DataMaid will now start analyzing your data!


Cleaning your data

Now that DataMaid is connected, the app has swept your data into the following dirty data piles:

Now, let's get these records polished!

RECORDS

The app will scan record names, emails, phone numbers, addresses, and ambiguous records for potential issues with the data and provide you with suggested fixes for that data.

For the Names section, feel free to select ignore if the name is correct. All other sections under Records must be fixed. Keep doing this until all your records have been cleared.

A very important section within Records is Ambiguous Records. A customer record is ambiguous if it has both:

  • A First Name and Last Name

  • A Company Name

  • AND the Display Name of the record does not exactly match either one

    • For example, no middle name or initial in the Display Name if it's a person record.

The result is that the initial sync to bring those customers in from QuickBooks Online would fail due to Novi being unable to determine if the record is for a company or a person.

On a similar note, the Backwards Names section will also help clean up Display Names. "People" records in QuickBooks Online should be in 'First Last' format, not 'Last, First'.

  • A note on Billing Contacts - Remember that in Novi you will be creating separate records for people who serve as billing contacts, assuming they do not already have their own record within QuickBooks Online, so you do not need their name on the company record. That being said, after your data import is done Novi can automatically send over the Billing Contact's name to the company's record in QuickBooks so it can be added to the company's transactions. Just let us know if you would like this setting turned on!

TRANSACTIONS

After you've cleaned all your records, it's time to move to transactions. Click the 'Transactions' header to reveal potential errors in your data dues to Unapplied Payments, Missing Invoice Numbers, and/or Payments Directly Deposited to the Bank. 

This area may require a  little more legwork and research into your QuickBooks transactions to figure out if the data needs to be fixed or ignored. 

DUPLICATES

QuickBooks does not allow exact duplicates to be created, but duplicates can sneak into the system with slight name variations. For example, "The White House" and "White House, The" are probably the same record and would need to be merged. DataMaid will scan and identify any records that have an 80% name match. 

The app will scan your customers, vendors, accounts, and items to identify such potential duplicates. You can clear this out the same way you cleared your Records and Transactions lists.

If you don't have time to do all of this in one clean sweep, don't worry! You can always come back any time and reconnect your data. Happy Cleaning!

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