How do you clean monitoring data without losing the audit trail?

Use the built-in review tools rather than editing exports: approvals to catch bad responses before they count, the deduplicator to merge sites recorded twice, and validation in the form to stop the error recurring. The corrections stay in the system, so the data everyone reports from is the corrected data.

Video: Cleaning Your Data in mWater on YouTube

Why this matters

Cleaning in a downloaded spreadsheet is the most common and most damaging shortcut in monitoring work. It creates a private, better copy of the data while the shared system keeps serving the bad version, and it fixes symptoms without touching the form that produced them. Cleaning in place is slower to start and much cheaper over a programme's life, because each fix is visible and each cause can be closed off.

How to do it

  1. Set up approvals so a person reviews responses before they become final.
  2. Add validation to the survey for the errors you keep seeing, so they are caught at the point of entry.
  3. Use the deduplicator where multiple teams have mapped the same facilities.
  4. Review site data for obviously wrong locations, such as points falling outside the district.
  5. Fix the survey design when the same correction is needed repeatedly, rather than correcting each response.
  6. Keep working from the platform rather than a cleaned local copy, so everyone reports the same numbers.

Go deeper