Data hygiene: rules that keep important fields filled
Required fields make data entry slow, so most fields stay optional. Over time, tasks lose their assignee, deals lose their close date and key results go stale. Data hygiene turns that quiet problem into something you can see and fix. Admins write rules. Worknano checks them against your records, scores the result, and tells each person what they owe.
The fixing part has its own agent: the Data Hygiene Assistant. It reads the findings and proposes the missing values, and you confirm each change. This article explains the rules, the view and the digest around it.
What a rule says
Admins define rules on the Organization page, in the Data hygiene section. A rule is a record with these parts:
- Model and required field. Which records are checked, and which field must be filled. A rule can instead use a condition, for example key results where the last update is older than 30 days.
- Applies to. A filter for the records the rule covers, such as active tasks that are not done. Empty means every record of the model.
- Severity. Critical, Warning or Low. Critical and Warning count toward the score and the digest. Low is shown only.
- Grace period. A number of days, counted from a date field such as the start date. Records younger than that are not counted yet. A record without that date counts as past the grace period.
- Accountable person. The user field that names who should fix the record. If you leave it empty, Worknano uses the assignee, then the creator, when the model has them.
- Message. One sentence people see, such as "Open tasks need a due date."
The owner field matters. A task without an assignee cannot be owned by its assignee, so that rule points to the creator. A task without a due date points to the assignee, who knows the plan.
Grace days instead of required fields
Nobody is blocked from saving. A new task can exist without a due date for three days. After that, it appears as a gap for the person who owns that rule.
The Data hygiene section on My
Every user finds their own gaps on the My page. The section shows:
- The hygiene score from 0 to 100, with the number of records checked and the number of gaps. It is the share of checked records that have no violation.
- Severity chips for Critical, Warning and Low.
- A list of rules with violations, each with a bar. Open a rule to see the records. Each row links to the record, shows its owner and its creation date.
- Only mine, a switch that limits the view to your own records.
- Scan again and a link to manage the rules, if you may edit them.
- Fix with assistant, which opens the page assistant with a clean-up request that starts with the Critical rules.
You only see records you are allowed to read. Row access and field permissions apply to the counts as well as to the lists.
The daily digest
Each morning, people who own records that break a Critical or Warning rule get one notification: "{count} records need your attention". It links to the Data hygiene section on My. The digest carries a number and a link, never record details. Someone only gets counted for models their role can read, and nobody gets a message with zero.
Organisations that do not want it can switch it off. The setting is called Send daily data hygiene digest, in the settings of the Organization module, and it is on by default.
13 default rules
New workspaces start with rules for the modules they use.
- Projects and tasks: active tasks without an assignee, open tasks without a due date, active projects without an owner, and active projects without a target end date.
- OKR: key results without a responsible person, without an accountable person, without a due date, without a first value, and not updated for 30 days. Objectives without an aligned goal appear as Low.
- CRM: contacts without an owner, open deals without an owner, and open deals without an expected close date.
The key result rules look at the current year and quarter and skip achieved results. You can edit, switch off or add rules to fit your company.
Fix it with an agent
A list of gaps is not a fix. The Data Hygiene Assistant works rule by rule, ten records at a time. It proposes a value only when the record supports it, and every change is a preview you confirm. Read how it behaves, and what it refuses to guess, in the agent article. To see the other assistants on your pages, read AI Assistants.