Database clean-up

Stacy Cope 3

Hi Austen! What are your best recommendations for database clean-up? I'm seeing a lot of issues like fundraisers not marking actions complete, the same phone number listed twice on the same record, and other inconsistencies.

Austen Brown

@Stacy Cope - Great question! Clean-up is one of those areas that you need to set aside time daily/weekly to tackle. I recommend paying attention to the ‘high traffic areas’ (const contact info, biographic info, add/sals) and any areas that are crucial to your reporting. From there, pay attention to error patterns - if you see the same error multiple times, chances are that it's repeated elsewhere in the system.

Start by creating a couple maintenance queries - I like to set these up so the results are errors that need to be fixed, meaning as you progress through your work the list gets shorter and shorter. Here's a blog that includes the 20 queries I look at every week:

If you're interested in automation, most of these can be created within a Power Automate flow that either resolves the issue for you or sends a notification as the issue arises - plus some other really cool things.