Data cleaning · Matthews, NC
Matthews data cleaning for market sellers and small shops
Matthews sells on Saturdays. The farmers market on N. Trade Street says it has supported local farmers and makers for 33 years, and a seller who has kept notes for years has a sheet with several eras of habits in it. We make that sheet add up.
Matthews cleaning for Saturday sales on N. Trade Street
The Matthews Community Farmers Market meets Saturdays from 8 a.m. to noon, April 11 to November 21, 2026. A stall owner records what sold in a notebook, a phone note or a card reader export, and each source spells the product its own way.
We gather the spellings, you tell us which wins, and a script applies it across every row. Tomatoes, tomato and Tomatos become one product with one total.
Winter markets and the second sheet
The winter season runs Saturdays from 9 to 11 a.m. starting December 5, 2026 through March 2027, with Tuesday evening markets on November 24 and December 22. Sellers often start a new sheet for a new season and the two never quite match. Column names differ, prices change format, a buyer appears in both.
We bring both under one set of rules. The buyer who shopped in summer and winter becomes one row, so loyal customers are counted as loyal.
Prices that arrive as text in Matthews
Market cash goes in as 64 with a dollar sign, a plain 64 or the words sixty-four. Only some of those can be added. We turn each into a number and show the changed cells next to the originals, so you can check a handful before trusting the rest.
Labor Day brings the Matthews Alive parade, which officials called the largest Labor Day parade in the Southeastern United States. Event weekends like that produce one-day sheets that often get pasted into the main file with a different layout. We align them.
Free advising, better with tidy rows
The Small Business Center at Central Piedmont Community College serves owners across Mecklenburg County, which includes Matthews, with free one-on-one advising. Mecklenburg County's Office of Economic Development offers consulting and training online. Bring a sheet where each buyer has one row and each product has one name, and the conversation can start from the numbers.
Questions from Matthews owners
I started a new spreadsheet each season. Can you combine them?
Yes. We read both, agree on one set of labels with you, and apply the same rules to each. The before and after counts show what moved.
Is a stall with a few hundred rows too small for this?
No. Small sheets hide repeats as much as larger ones do, and a wrong total costs a small seller more of the week.
What if I wrote notes by hand and never typed them in?
Typing in is mining, the stage before cleaning. We can talk about it on the call, then clean the result.
Sources for the facts on this page: Matthews Community Farmers Market · Matthews, North Carolina, Wikipedia · Small Business Center, Central Piedmont Community College
Bring us the market sheet from last season
Tell us on a free call what you want counted. Pick a 15 or 30 minute slot on the contact page.