A field can be filled in correctly and still mean different things to different people. That is the part of data quality I find easy to miss when the conversation starts with cleaning up records. A value can pass every validation rule and still be the wrong thing to use for the decision in front of you.
Consider a status like “active.” It might mean there is a current agreement, that someone has used a service recently, or simply that nobody has closed the record. None of those definitions is automatically unreasonable. They are just different. If two teams bring different meanings to the same report, tidying the spelling won't resolve the disagreement.
I'd want to start with what someone needs to know and why. Are they deciding whom to contact? Checking whether work is complete? Trying to understand what needs attention? That gives us a reason to examine particular fields rather than treating every blank as equally urgent. It also gives the person entering the information a better explanation than the fact that the system requires it.
Before taking away the spreadsheet
A separate spreadsheet or a set of private notes can look like a problem to eliminate. I would first want to know what it provides. Perhaps it has a definition people agree on. Perhaps it preserves context that the shared record doesn't have room for. Or perhaps someone knows who to ask when a number looks wrong. These are possibilities to investigate, not reasons to assume the shared system has failed.
Moving that information into a different tool won't automatically preserve what made it useful. Someone still needs to keep it current. Another person needs a way to flag a mistake without wondering whether they are allowed to change the record. If two sources disagree, there needs to be somewhere to take the question other than another private copy.
Technical cleanup matters. Duplicates, inconsistent formats, and missing values can make ordinary work harder. But I don't think asking people to trust a cleaned dataset is enough. I'd want to be able to explain where a value came from, what it means here, and how to get it corrected. Those are reasonable questions, especially for someone being asked to give up a workaround they understand.
A report can look wonderfully tidy while those questions remain unanswered. Before adding another required field, I'd rather sit with the person who has to fill it in and work through what they can actually know at that point in their day.