Sometimes you may run into issues when building or viewing reports connected to Catalyst that show incorrect, missing, negative, or doubled amounts. There are many reasons data may not appear in your Excel cube file, when you believe it should exist. Some of those reasons are highlighted below, along with ways to check. Usually there will be an explanation for this and can be fixed.
This article contains the following topics:
- Reasons for missing data
- Data automation failure
- Report configuration
- Negative or doubled amounts
- Overrides
- Hierarchy management
- Unassigned accounts
- Sign flip incorrectly applied
- Stale or corrupt file
Reasons data may not be present or incorrect
Below are some of the reasons you may not be seeing your data.
Data automation failure
If your Catalyst instance is automated data may not have been ingested via the overnight jobs. This could occur for many reasons, either a source ERP extract failure or a failure on our end due to a connection issue. Regardless of why, you'll want to first confirm a few things:
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- Is data present in your source ERP? E.g. were sales made and recorded in your ERP?
- Is data present in the Catalyst website in your Manage Actuals section? To check go to Administration > Financial or Profitability Actuals > Set your filters and click Apply.
- Is your Catalyst instance still processing that data? You can check on the System Status page in your Catalyst website.
- Is the report you're viewing and expecting to see data in configured correctly? Oftentimes filters can be in place that may be hiding the data you're looking for.
- If all those things check out, submit a support ticket asking our team to check our landing tables for the missing data. Please include an extract from your source ERP with transaction level detailed examples from the period in question so we can cross reference those amounts.
Report issue or misconfiguration
We often receive inquiries about missing data that were the result of a filtering nuance or stale report. Below are some tips to check your file to ensure it's up to date and configured correctly.
- The first step when your file doesn't show data you expect to be there is to check your Catalyst website under Manage Actuals. To check go to Administration > Financial or Profitability Actuals > Set your filters and click Apply. If your data is present in the Catalyst website but not in the cube, there may be overrides in place, the cube is refreshing, or there is something misconfigured in your file.
- Next check financial or profitability overrides. Overrides are explained here and can effectively overwrite data we receive from your source ERP. Overrides may be in place unknowingly, so double check the account or customer/item combination for the period in question to see if any overrides are impacting your amounts.
- Double check filters (is currency enabled and in your filters?), hidden columns, hidden rows, and pivot settings in your file. For example, you may have rows/columns with no data hidden by default.
- Finally, run your file through the Cube Updater for good measure. You may have a broken or stale connection to EBM, which the Cube Updater will fix.
Negative, missing, doubled, or incorrect values in the cube
Typically, when something like this occurs you'll find that there's something misaligned in how your hierarchies are configured or with how accounts have been assigned to your hierarchies. Alternatively, it may be a matter of overrides being in place in the website, or could be due to a stale file that needs to be refreshed or rebuilt. Other times, it can relate to sign flip.
Overrides
Occasionally overrides will be placed in Manage Actuals, which then impact data in the cubes. Usually, it's best practice to be sure your account variances aren't related to similar account overrides. To check overrides and to learn more about how they work, check our tutorial here.
Hierarchy or account misalignment
Drill down to the lowest level of the hierarchy your unexpected valued account lives in. If your account lives in the Income Statement, drill down into it's respective level until you find it. Is it in the proper bucket? To do this in Catalyst, go to Hierarchy Management, find the relevant hierarchy, then go to Tree View. Reassign as needed and refresh the cube.
Basically, you'll want to look at all your accounts in the bucket you're seeing a variance in your source ERP and compare it to all of the accounts in that same bucket in a Catalyst cube to see if and where the variance exists by account. If you can find the missing values that means there needs to be some remapping of accounts in the hierarchy so they are properly placed in the correct bucket.
Unassigned accounts
You may also have an amount tied to an account that hasn't been assigned to a hierarchy. This can occur anytime new data is introduced into the system. All data must be mapped to a hierarchy. To check for unassigned accounts, either go to the Export/Upload tab and search for "unassigned" or go to the Tree View tab. Reassign as needed and refresh the cube.
Sign flip applied incorrectly
Make sure you don't have account buckets (e.g. hierarchy nodes or leaves) sign-flipped inappropriately. When you apply sign flip to a grouping or an account element it will automatically apply the opposite sign to the value entered into the equation. To confirm which buckets are applied sign flip, go to the Sign Flip tab in the hierarchy management page. Reapply or remove the attribute. Refresh the cube.
Stale file
Sometimes files will become stale or unusable, which can manifest in variances or incorrect data in your file to that of the Catalyst website. Certain files will carry with them conditions that may produce a stale state, such as files that are really big in size, or that contain an abnormally large amount of data or rows of data, files you use over and over again and continuously add to or modify, rearrange or reformat, resave, or share via the cloud, all can fall risk of creating a stale state. When this happens, here are some things to try:
- Refresh all cubes in the EBM Office Bridge ribbon.
- Check the connections under the Data tab in Excel. You should only need one connection for each data type (e.g. Financial, Profitability, Journal Entry, AR, AP, Inventory). If you have duplicates, you'll want to pare these down to eliminate the potential for redundancy.
- Restore an older version of the file from Dropbox or wherever it's been saved.
- Limit sharing this file via the cloud, such as in Teams or Sharepoint. Use a file transfer service to share a hard copy of the file or keep it saved locally and pull it down to your desktop if it's shared in a cloud based folder.
- Pull down a fresh cube of the same data type and copy your relevant tab from the stale file into the fresh cube file as a new tab. Choose overwrite, rather than copy when pasting.
- Keep the file as is, but remove all other tabs that aren't relevant to the work you need done. Refresh just the one tab. You'll want to make a backup of the original file and save it to your desktop before doing this.
- Rebuild the entire report/schedule in a fresh cube file.
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