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What are financial and profitability overrides?
Each day, invoices and transactions are loaded into Catalyst via the automation from your source ERP system or via upload. As the end-user you have the ability to change those numbers after they've landed in Catalyst, either via Manage Actuals or via Overrides.
- Values edited using the Manage Actuals function will be overwritten by your nightly automation from your source ERP. Use this method for a same day change in Catalyst that's also been changed in your ERP.
- Editing values using Overrides will not be overwritten by automation. Overrides will always win. Use this method when the change must occur in Catalyst but has not yet occurred in your ERP.
Navigation: Administration > Manage Actuals, Financial and Profitability Overrides
Notes
- Overrides allow you to override (i.e. replace or overwrite) values that exist in your actuals. Simply put, they are used to override a transaction or account total in Catalyst, rather than doing so in your source ERP system, and usually for just a temporary period of time.
- The amount entered quite literally replaces what's already in the system for that line.
- Overrides don’t force balance and don’t consider the accounting equation or 2-sided entries (debit/credit), it simply changes the end value.
- For the above reason, overrides aren't necessarily best practice, but more of a stop gap tool to use temporarily. Ideally, you would just book a journal entry to your ERP and let that data flow back into Catalyst.
Why use overrides?
In general, overrides are used when wanting to fix actuals that have come through via automation. Usually they are only temporary and should be removed as soon as they are no longer needed (e.g. when your source system is correct again).
Notes
- Overrides are helpful when you need a change to exist for more than 24 hours, because otherwise you can just make the change in manage actuals for a day until the automation overwrites that again the following night.
- Another use case for overrides is using them to reassign values to other accounts. For example, if you don’t have access to an old ERP system or in one-off instances.
- E.g. Say we don't know where Distribution Expense should land in our new chart of accounts. Is it part of COGS or is it an Operating Expense? Maybe in the past it was put it in as an operating expense, but now you want it in COGS. In that case, you may want to override the data to move it to where you now want it to be.
- Or if an amount was booked under one account, but now you want it be spread across multiple accounts, you’ll need to use overrides for that.
- E.g. Legal Expense of $100 is now in 5 different Legal Expense accounts (Corp Legal, Professional Legal, Govt Legal, C Suite Legal, General Legal). That $100 amount now needs to be spread accordingly to those new accounts. Overrides can help you do this.
How to enter overrides?
- Navigate to Administration > Manage Actuals > Financial or Profitability Overrides.
- Set your filters. Click Apply.
- Excel Options > Export.
- In Excel, enter your new value(s) in the Override column.
- Upload.
- You're done!
- When you're ready to remove your override(s), follow steps 1-3 and then blank out the cells of the sheet in the Override column you want removed. Do not add zeros to these cells, as that will create an override in the amount of 0.
Notes
- Override Only Menu: True will give you a list of all currently set overrides within the dataset you've selected in your filters. This is helpful to see what changes you've made so that you can report off them or remove them. False will show all data from the dataset you've selected in your filters.
Best practices
- TA Callout: If any account you're overriding has TAs associated with it, you must include all rows for that account in your upload even if you're not changing all rows.
- It’s easy to forget overrides are in place or not know if they are in place, so be mindful when creating new overrides and remove them as soon as they’re no longer necessary.
- Financial overrides are only for activity, not balances. So know that if there are any changes to Balance Sheet accounts it will affect beginning balances in the subsequent years.
- If you are having a hard time validating your data in the cubes to your actuals (e.g. actuals don’t match what’s in the cube), double check overrides, you may have one in place. Overrides will always win no matter what and they'll pull that value into the cube.
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If there’s a temporary change that has to be made and you're OK with and expect the automation to undo that change once it runs again, it is recommended to just enter the change in Manage Actuals rather than as an override. Because you’ll get the same benefit of fixing the data but the automation will overwrite it as expected.
- Use case: You need the change in Catalyst today, but you've also fixed it in your source ERP system.
- Overrides and transaction attributes can become complex. See bullet one. Trying to override something that has TA’s may require assistance from our team to walk through.
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