My Salary
2008 Salary Survey Data | Money Management | Financial Knowledge | Stocks and Shares | Your Salary | Pay Rates

Data Cleansing

Some people won't know what data cleansing or data cleaning is, and how to make money from it.

In essence this is simply a case of taking a series of data, off in spreadsheet format, and checking it and removing the data that is either out of date, irrelevant, poorly formatted, and making it nice and new again.

It is the data equivalent of doing a good spring clean. For instance someone may have a database of contacts that gradually over time lose their validity, or rows of data that get messed up. Your job is to spot these and clean up the document.

Or often people will have data in an impure format, for instance it will have extra commas and spaces, or some fields will contain a telephone number, others an email and so forth. Your job again is to tidy and clean it up.

If you have patience, a good eye for detail, concentration levels and a basic knowledge of spreadsheets and using tabular data, then this could be the ideal part time job for you.

It can be boring and time consuming which puts a lot of people off doing this - and that means that there is a big market for it. Indeed data cleansing businesses can do very nicely, and there should be no shortage of people looking for help with this sort of thing.

Market your services in business forums and local business sites in your area, and you should soon get some clients coming through. Top tip is to ask for a couple of rows of data before you quote so you know just what you are quoting for and how messed up the data is!