Data quality audit checklist for SMEs
Quick answer
Data quality audit checklist for SMEs helps UK SMEs understand what Digital Adaption does, where it fits, and how the process works from first conversation to practical data management, migration, automation or reporting work.
This checklist is for finance, operations and leadership teams who know the numbers are not quite trusted but need a practical starting point. Use it before rebuilding dashboards, automating approvals, moving to a new CRM or preparing an ERP data migration.
The aim is not to find every bad record. The aim is to identify the data issues that create business risk: unreliable reports, failed imports, duplicated customers, invalid supplier records, missing ownership and spreadsheet logic that nobody can audit.
1. Entity checks
- Duplicate customers, suppliers, products, contacts, locations and projects.
- Inactive records still appearing in reports, workflows or migration scope.
- Conflicting names, codes, VAT numbers, account references or product categories.
- Records with no clear owner, source system or update route.
2. Field-level checks
- Missing mandatory fields needed for reporting, migration or workflow rules.
- Invalid dates, statuses, currencies, units of measure, finance dimensions and categories.
- Free-text fields being used where controlled lists should exist.
- Values that mean different things to finance, operations and sales teams.
3. Reporting checks
- List reports that do not reconcile to finance or operational source systems.
- Agree KPI definitions and identify who owns each calculation.
- Document manual spreadsheet adjustments, refresh steps and exception handling.
- Identify which report is authoritative when two dashboards disagree.
4. Output from the audit
The useful output is a ranked data-quality backlog, not a theoretical governance document. For each issue, capture the business risk, owner, affected reports or systems, suggested fix, dependency and target date. Link high-risk items to data management consultancy or migration readiness work where needed.
Digital Adaption helps UK SMEs turn data-quality checks into an owner matrix, cleanup backlog and reporting-risk plan. Book a data review.