Pomio CRM keeps contacts, companies and deals in one shared workspace. The weekly pipeline review looks at open deals. A monthly data-quality check looks at everything else: the contacts and companies that quietly decide whether your reports and follow-up can be trusted.
Why CRM data decays
Nobody sets out to make a CRM messy. People change jobs, colleagues add the same contact twice under a slightly different spelling, imports bring in half-filled rows, and a salesperson leaves without their records being reassigned. Each gap is small. After a year they add up to a list nobody fully trusts, and the team goes back to keeping its own notes.
What a monthly check covers
Keep the list short and identical every month so it becomes routine. A practical starting set: contacts and companies without an owner; likely duplicates, especially after an import; contacts not linked to a company; leads without a source; and records nobody has touched for a long time. Add one item only when a real problem keeps coming back.
Who runs it and how long it takes
Give the check to one named person, not to “everyone”. That person runs the filters, fixes what is obvious and sends the rest to the record owner with a clear question. For most SMEs this takes less than an hour a month. If it takes much longer, the problem is usually upstream: required fields that are not required, or an import process without a duplicate check.
Fix at the source, not in a spreadsheet
Exporting the CRM to a spreadsheet, cleaning it there and leaving the CRM untouched only creates a second version of the truth. Merge duplicates, assign owners and link contacts in the CRM itself. Records that are no longer relevant are usually better archived than deleted, so history stays intact, and leads that never bought need a clear retention period rather than living forever.
How Pomio CRM helps
In Pomio CRM every contact, company and deal carries its owner, and contacts and deals are linked to companies. That makes the monthly check a matter of filtering the shared list views on missing owners, missing links or missing sources, fixing them on the record and moving on. Pair it with the quarterly access review so data and logins are both kept in order.
A practical checklist
Pick one fixed date each month; give the check to one named person; filter records without an owner; look for likely duplicates and merge them; link loose contacts to their company; fill in missing lead sources where they are known; archive records that are no longer relevant; send unclear cases to the record owner; note recurring problems and fix the process that causes them.
Further reading
Is monthly too often for a small team?
For a team of two or three with few new records, every other month can be enough. The point is a fixed rhythm, not a fixed number.
Should we clean everything at once first?
Only if the backlog is small. Otherwise start the monthly check now and work through older records a section at a time; a perfect clean-up that never finishes helps nobody.
Can the check be automated?
Saved filters do most of the finding. Deciding which of two duplicates is correct, or who should own an orphaned record, still needs a person.
What if the same problem returns every month?
Then fix the cause: make a field required, add a duplicate check to imports, or agree who reassigns records when someone leaves.