A word for a single piece of type of information, equivalent to a field on a form
I'm inventorying all types of information used by the people involved in a business process, things such as client name, price, price index, adress,quantities sold, stocks etc.
If I were to do the same thing about a form I would call it inventorying the form fields.
Here, I'm looking for a single word that would mean the same thing on a whole businness process involving dozens of steps and around forty different #### of information.
What could we replace #### by ?
The alternatives, so far:
"type" of information/data seems to wide for the purpose. Numerical/text/financial/psychological are types. I feel that "name, adress, temperature of the day, gross margin..." are too narrow to fill a whole "type".
"field" cannot be used as it for a whole business process involving tens of forms, data that stays in the background, information on spreadsheets, information transmitted through phones, snail mail, email etc. The data used does not necessarily go on a form or a spreadsheet.
"category" seems to fit the 6 or 7 fields that, for example, identify a client (name, surname, middle name, address, id # ...). In my mind, that would constitute a category of information, i.e. identification constitute a category of data.
"piece" of data/info is okay for a single entry, "John Doe" is a piece of info, "address"/"margin"/"date of entry" is not a single piece.
listing, record, catalogue, account, roll, file, tally seem all too narrow/ too wide, too specific to a field of interest.
Solution 1:
meant to post this days ago but I was on my lunch break and ran out of time, anyway:
How about "variable".
You could say you're collecting information used by the people involved in a business, involving over 40 variables, such as client name, price, price index, address,quantities sold, stocks etc.
"parameter" might work too. Or "attribute"
To be honest though, field isn't bad either.
Solution 2:
The word usually used is simply datum.
It is the singular of the word data and describes any single piece of information.
It is true that nowadays, data is used as a singular word describing information. However, in the scientific world in particular, a datum is still widely used to reference a single entity. It is also used in combination with other nouns, for example a datum point or a datum entry.