Clerks type fee amounts into a free-text 'notes' field because the fee field is locked, then finance scrapes those notes for billing. What anti-pattern is this?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Stuffing fee amounts into Notes is like writing the price on a napkin and calling it the cash register. Shadow structured use of free text wrecks usability, integrity, and automation. Put fees in a real field with rules.
Full Explanation
When staff encode structured facts in free-text notes, automation, validation, and reporting cannot reliably consume them. Integrity suffers because competing values may exist in both notes and proper fields, and usability drops for anyone who must parse prose. The durable fix is to unlock or redesign the structured field and stop using notes as a workaround ledger. Process and UI changes usually matter as much as cleansing.