Dating My Clients

So there I am, minding my own business, wading through 15 contacts per day playing catch-up, and I notice that a record has dropped through the cracks!

I maintain three date fields in a person’s record:

(1) The date the record was added

(2) The date the record was last modified

(3) The date the person is due for a follow-up call

In several cases one or more of these fields are null.

A null date field means that the record may not show up when I ask to see “Which records are due for follow-up today?” or “Which records have not been modified (with new information) for the longest time?”.

So I took 15 minutes off work and drafted a bit of code which ran thus:

If the date-last-modified field is null, then set it to be TODAY less 6 months ago. That ism make it instantly-very-stale, forcing me to look at it closely on the next contacts run (tomorrow morning)

If the date-added is null, then set it to the date-last-modified. By the first piece of code, date-last-modified is never null, so date-added will be set, at worst, the most recent date of modification. Not perfect, but at least it is a value.

If the date-to-follow-up is null, then set it to be the date-added. That should force me to look at records which are added BUT might never have been contacted!

In many cases I’ll find that everything is on schedule, but in some cases I’ll find a person who has never been contacted, and I’ll rectify that immediately.

It worked so smoothly that I repeated the procedure for my “Company” and “Branch” tables!

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