CP2335-23 Data Cleansing of Financial Data

Devon County Council (DCC) is replacing its finance system, together with some ancillary systems. The current system is over 25 years old with data that has built up over these years. The contract for the new finance system is expected to be awarded during April 2023. There are around 45,000 active entities on our finance system and these consist of public sector organisations, (schools, NHS, fire services, policy, district councils, parish councils), private sector businesses (corporates from PLCs to SMEs), individuals, consultants, not for profit organisations and unincorporated organisations. In addition, there are around a further 10,000 entities on one of the two other organisations that use the current finance system. The other organisations are Pensions and Dartmoor National Park Authority. The entities represent either debtors or creditors and all are active. We estimate that up to 60 fields per entity could need validating. Having a good quality data set is essential to the Future Finance System project and we know the current state of the data is poor. The work we need undertaken will resolve data inconsistencies, errors, duplications, missing information, identify fields that are wrongly used, void spaces and all other issues. The data needs to be cleaned and/or completed, with the addition of new information where fields are currently blank, to ensure we have quality data ready to be migrated into the new finance system.