Data Validation

Years ago, while hosting Saturday Night Live, Steve Martin used that phrase during his opening monologue. It was all about how using the words “I forgot” can get you out of any bad situation. For instance, he said you can easily become a millionaire by not paying taxes and when the IRS comes and asks why you haven’t paid your taxes all you have to say is “I forgot.” And if you are on trial for armed robbery all you have to say to the judge is “I forgot armed robbery was illegal.”

However, during the budget cycle this phrase seems to come up all too often and when it does it is not nearly as humorous. For example, often time budget reviewers will see that budget contributors have forecasted for new employee hires but have not performed the required increases to the related training and computer hardware budgets. Or even though upper management has mandated cuts in certain areas, the numbers are increased. And what answer do you think the reviewers get back when they ask the contributors about why they didn’t follow the rules? You guessed it – “I forgot.”

Forgetting the rules can was time and money

So why do they forget? Well odds are the budget guidance or rules was sent out in an email at the start of the budget cycle and by the time the contributor gets around to doing the budget, that email has either been deleted or at best a distant memory. Plus doing budgets is not a day to day occurrence so people are out of their element and just trying to get through as quickly as possible. However, in the end, forgetting the rules ends up costing your organization a great deal of time and negatively affects the quality of your final budget and its data integrity.

Enforce rules in your templates

This is where the Data Validation feature of True Sky can help. True Sky allows you to build data validation rules into your Templates. If you can dream it and you can logically define it you can create a validation around it – all without any type of code or custom development. These validations can also be configured to run manually on-demand or automatically after a user retrieves data, before they save or after they save their work.

In addition, if you are using an approval workflow process, you can configure your validations to actually prevent users from submitting their numbers for approval until they meet your guidelines. Setting up validations are quick and easy and they can save your organization countless hours, improve the quality of your data and help ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.

This is just one of the nifty data validation tools within True Sky to help you with your budgeting and forecasting.

Learn how to streamline and manage your budgeting, planning and forecasting process, contact True Sky today.