Five Benefits of Firm Management Database Clean-Up

You may be wondering if a database cleanup would be beneficial for your firm management system. We highly recommend CCH ProSystem fx Practice Management customers schedule cleanups on a regular basis to improve the speed at which the software performs. Firm management database clean-up also helps to keep the amount of data you have to filter through on look-up screens to a manageable size. The pattern most firms follow is retaining anywhere from 3 to 5 years of historical data (AR and Billed WIP detail).

The biggest benefits of doing a Database Cleanup are:

• Validate data. Discover data validation problems that may be causing reporting issues or mismatched data.  This analysis includes many items not included on the standard Practice Management Data Integrity reports.
• Improve performance. Purging data allows contact management, reporting, and look-ups to load and run faster.
• Improve organization.
  • Free up client codes, employee codes, and service codes that your firm can reuse after the cleanup.
  • Discover clients that have no activity or balances.  These clients can then be reviewed and purged.
  • Eliminate offices, partners and clients that may exist as a result of a firm split.
  • Reduce the risk of encountering duplicate invoice numbers
• Reduce risk and measure liability. Retaining discoverable data for much longer than required by regulatory, industry, and statutory guidelines needlessly increases risk exposure for both the firm and its clients. Consult with your malpractice carrier or legal counsel for more details and to ensure compliance.
• Reduce database footprint.
  • Minimize the overall size of the database.
  • Decrease progress billing detail records to one balance record based on the cutoff date.
  • Prevent SQL Server constraint issues.  The free version of SQL Server has database size limitations.  This can cause issues if the Practice Management database grows beyond these size limits.

What can you purge?

Consultants can purge many different types of data related to offices, partners and clients that you no longer need as part of your live database. The following list of items can be purged:

1. WIP History as of any date you wish to provide
2. Nonbillable WIP as of any date you wish to provide
3. Invoices as of any date you wish to provide
4. AR History as of any date you wish to provide
5. Inactive Clients that have no open WIP or AR and/or no history within the time period you wish to retain history records
6. Inactive Employees with no open WIP tied to them and/or no history within the time period you wish to retain history records
7. Any Projects no longer used
8. Old Affiliates, Referrals and Contacts
9. Inactive Service Codes with no activity within the time period you wish to retain history records
10. Deleted records (Whenever you delete something it no longer appears through the software but remains in the database only marked as ‘Deleted.’)

Each firm management database clean-up is unique depending on the firm’s needs. Therefore, your firm should provide your consultant with a detailed cover letter. The Cover Letter includes instructions explaining exactly what you want to clean out and as of what dates.  You will receive a list of clients and employees who are marked inactive to review and check before they are purged.

If you are interested in moving forward with a firm management database clean-up on your CCH ProSystem fx Practice Management database, contact us today.