Data cleaning · Raleigh, NC
Raleigh data cleaning by downtown district
Downtown Raleigh has six named districts and a monthly First Friday. If your records label those places inconsistently, reports by district come out wrong. We settle the names and merge the repeats.
Raleigh cleaning: six districts, one spelling each
The Downtown Raleigh Alliance names six downtown districts: Capital District, Fayetteville Street, Glenwood South, Moore Square, Warehouse District, and Seaboard + Person Street. That last one alone can show up as Seaboard, Person St, Seaboard+Person or S+P.
We list every spelling in your location column, you assign each to a district, and one script rewrites every row. Sales per district then mean one thing. A manager who reads the chart afterward sees six bars for six places, and each bar holds every sale that belongs to it, whichever way the clerk typed the name.
Cleaning First Friday and festival sales
First Friday Raleigh runs monthly from 6 to 9 p.m., and the alliance also lists Sip n' Stroll Downtown Raleigh and the Raleigh Tree Lighting. A shop that logs event nights separately from regular days tends to end up with two sheets, two sets of labels and customers who appear in both.
We bring the sheets under one rule set and merge the customers who match. Then we compare totals before and after, and you see each merge.
Cleaning data for the Triangle's research and tech trades
Research Triangle Park, established in 1959, helped create thousands of science and technology jobs, and Raleigh is the largest city in the Research Triangle area. Small firms that sell to that world, such as lab suppliers, consultants and freelancers, hold lists of institutions with many names. NC State, N.C. State and North Carolina State are one customer.
You decide which names are the same. We apply your decision to every row. A buyer's total across all its spellings then lands on one line, so you can see who your biggest accounts are.
Where owners already look for help
The Downtown Raleigh Alliance runs small business workshops. The Wake Tech Small Business Center offers free one-on-one counseling, and the city's support list includes SCORE, the SBTDC and the SBA. All of them ask for the same thing early: your numbers. Arriving with a clean sheet shortens that part.
Questions from Raleigh owners
My staff enter the district however they like. Can you fix the history?
We fix what has been typed. We also report which spellings were most common, which helps you pick a short list for staff to choose from.
Do you handle data from my point-of-sale system?
If it exports to a spreadsheet, we can clean it. Mining, our first stage, covers getting records into one table when they start elsewhere.
What does a before and after list look like?
Two columns side by side, the original cell and the fixed cell, for every row we touched. The core cleaning page shows a small example.
Sources for the facts on this page: Districts, Downtown Raleigh Alliance · About Us, Downtown Raleigh Alliance · Raleigh, North Carolina, Wikipedia
Start with the Raleigh sheet you trust least
Book a free call on the contact page and tell us what you need counted.