Data Entry Tips

Data Entry Tips to speed up transaction Entry

Written By Niall Conlon ()

Updated at February 15th, 2023

1.    Introduction:

Here are a few tips to help speed up data entry when you are processing transactions. 

2.    General Ledger / Customer / Supplier (Vendor) codes for Setup, Entry, and Reporting:

Make your Customer, Supplier (Vendor), BI codes & General Ledger codes meaningful so that they are easy to remember. Usually, General Ledger (GL) codes will be 4 numbers or longer but these codes can be alphanumeric, as well, if that is a requirement.

Using alphanumeric characters for your Customer/ Supplier (Vendor) codes, which are linked to their ‘short names’, will assist you in remembering these codes and will give you a quicker option of entering the first few characters in a field and pressing the Tab key (or Enter key) so that the system will intuitively fill in the remaining characters.

An example of this would be, entering a Customer Code such as, ‘ALCHEM’ or ‘ALLIEDC’ for 'Allied Chemicals' would be much easier to remember and for searching or filtering information.  Using  ‘A000001’ or ‘AC00001’ is probably not a good idea as there will eventually be too many ‘A’s’ and too many ‘ACs’ so you will have to keep looking it up to find the one you want.      

3.    Entering details on screens  for transaction Entry:

Use the Tab key instead of the mouse. To navigate all the fields from top to bottom and left to right, you can use the Tab or Enter keys on your keyboard repeatedly. Shift+Tab reverses the order of navigation to bring you back to previous fields.

Where a number of optional fields are being left blank or contain default values which will be accepted, use the Enter key (instead of Tab) which brings you to the most often edited fields for that particular option, thus saving quite a bit of time on some of the busier windows.

Set up your ‘default’ values so that they contain the most frequently used codes. Setting up ‘defaults’ is covered in detail here.