Secoda — What are you talking about ?!?

Revenue, Turnover, Sales or Value.

Getting started with your data project generally starts on a number of fronts.

Terminology forces itself to the forefront pretty early on. During early discussions with people involved in any data or reporting project it becomes clear that a common dictionary of terms is required.

Regardless of the tools in operation at any business, the naming conventions tend to be driven by the first builders of any output shared to a wider audience. Add to that, in all likelihood that they have probably used or made reference to the same words from the menu in the software that they ran the report from to export (likely into Excel) and before you know it we are thrown into a set terms that a product manager or software developer came up with when originally writing the software!

It happens at some point and whether that’s in the first meeting when we realise that the £1,000,000 number we are all referring to as Revenue, Turnover or Sales is the same thing or during a report off when user ‘A’ has a dashboard and one context and says thats the right number, and user ‘B’ has a different context argues their number is right.

Context warrants it’s own post so I’ll come back to another day.

Definition of your business terms is key. The sooner you start the better. Providing clear definitions will allow all business data users to understand quickly what they are looking at and to take information to the next level.

It doesn’t have to be complicated a simple document type of your choice and store the relevant amount of details. If you want to get ahead of the game, start to build your data catalog in a great tool like Secoda.

We’ve started using Secoda on our data projects with our clients. It’s a simple, cloud based solution to your data catalog needs. It goes way further than the topics I’ve touched on here but you can find that out with a free trial or if you need help get in touch.

See ya soon.

Steve