Minding the Penny Accounts

We’re doing a bit of database management today. Cleaning up lists, correcting bad data, etc.

So this post at J-Walk Blog got me thinking:

Threatened Over A Penny

In Massachusetts: City threatens blind woman over unpaid 1-cent bill.

A 74-year-old blind woman was shocked when her daughter found a letter from the city saying a lien would be placed on her home unless she paid an overdue water bill.

The amount? 1 cent.

Eileen Wilbur told The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro the letter sent her blood pressure soaring, and pointed out that stamps cost 42 cents.

City Collector Debora Marcoccio said the letter was among 2,000 sent out. A computer automatically prints letters for accounts with an overdue balance, and they are not reviewed by staff before being mailed, she said.

Note: The penny shown here is not the actually penny that she owes. It’s just a random penny. However, it could be used to pay the bill.

When you’ve got a long list of data, there is data that gets overlooked, and even the data that you know is wrong, but doesn’t seem worth fixing.

Do you fix it? Do you look for errors? Do you even know that the errors might exist?

Here’s an example: We divide our territories via area codes. This is done automatically by our CRM software. It was a challenge to keep up with new area codes over the years, but now we have a new problem:

We have prospects using cell phones issued from other regions. We can manually fix these as they are entered, but when we do sweeping data activities, and territory re-alignments, they may get assigned incorrectly.

What a pain in the neck!