Business is often only as good at its management. Whether its people, finances, time, or resources. Pretty much everything in business can be driven by data in one form or another. This is why we have data management. Webster’s Dictionary defines data in 3 ways

1. Factual information (such as measurements or statistics) used as a basis for reasoning, discussion, or calculation.
2. Information in digital form that can be transmitted or processed.
3. Information output by a sensing device or organ that includes both useful and irrelevant or redundant information that must be processed to be meaningful.

In today’s world, people think digital when they think about data.  But data is any information that’s collected, not just digitally. For the business person, data can encompass all information we collect –

• Customers wants, needs and complaints
• Workers hiring, training and retention
• Financial assets, liabilities, and inventory
• Products provided, needed and desired.
• Processes in manufacturing, producing and services
• Accounting of payroll, income and expenses
• Legal costs of taxes, insurance, and regulation adherence

The hard part is not collecting the data, but knowing what to collect and how to organize it. Thus, data management is any information organized and managed into some meaningful form.

If any of this sounds familiar, we must answer this question: Do we run our business or does our business run us?

Data Management Without Context is Useless

One way to ensure our business doesn’t “run us” is to get a handle on our record keeping. Remember, data is not just the digital information on our computers and smart phones. It’s the way we keep records of our finances, automobile usage, customer information, complaints, employees, payroll, insurance coverage, office records, supplies, inventory etc. The better records we keep, the more the information becomes useful.

However, due to the cost restraints from large data management systems, many small business owners must develop other ways to accumulate and arrange information including:

• Writing daily notes
• Making plans and to-do lists
• Organizing filing cabinets
• Scanning important documents
• Using record keeping software and programs
• Hiring professional bookkeepers
• Using social media platforms
• Doing customer surveys
• Paying for a data mining and analytic service company
• Hiring office managers or information officers

In the end, how we decide to accumulate and organize our data is pretty much left up to our own management style.

However, without a way to easily access and analyze this information, we have no way to determine exactly how our company is doing. Thus, data management is the way we organize and analyze the information our business generates. The better our system, the better handle we  have on our business

In the good old days, we had paper filing systems and calculators to help manage data. Today, we have computers and data entry devices like keyboards, mice, touchscreens, scanners, image recognition, AI and Bluetooth devices. Yet even with these inventions, it’s still a time-consuming endeavor. But once we find a way to manage our data, the easier managing our company can become.

One way to manage data is to digitize everything, and then find the appropriate software to manage it. Paper filing systems can also be effective and even faster. However, shuffling through filing cabinets can also be time-consuming for retrieval purposes. Quite often our system is a mixture of the two.

However, our goal at IFBL is to provide simple advice for making small business better. And to accomplish this we are currently putting together our simple roadmap system for data management for our next series of articles. But, until then, we recommend setting aside time each day to organize your data into a categorical format. Most often accounting software is a good place to start, because they focus on key metrics derived from general accounting practices. Another good format is to organize your data in a way that tracks both what you do (your products and services) and how you do it (the way you run your business).

Sometimes the best place to start is by focusing on data that helps you serve your customers better and/or makes operations more efficient. Whatever you decide to do, its better than what you are doing now or you probably wouldn’t still be reading this.