January 2024 Production Adoption Tip: Data History: Track all manual changes made to a member combination.

#1

Curious when your budget or forecast numbers change and your detective mode turns on? Try Data History! An administrator must turn on Data History for a cube. Once Data History is enabled through System Hub, you can now see the audit trail of the data (basically, the who, what, and when of all manual changes to a member combination).

Note: Data History tracks all manual changes made to a leaf-level member combination through the following:

  • Ad Hoc Analysis
  • Data-entry template
  • Line-Item Schedules
  • Trigger account for a procedural calculation account (an entry is logged in the history of each affected account)
  • Linked Detailed Planning Schedule
  • A Journal entry
  1. Right-click a number on your Template or Ad Hoc Data View and select Data History.
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  2. A log will pop up for that number:
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To know more about this useful feature check out these links below:

Article: Reviewing Data History
Help Doc: Data History and FAQs

#2

Great tip! thanks for sharing!

#3

Thanks, Is these feature also available on-prem?

#4

Nice tip. Thank you.

#5

Thank you for sharing, very useful tip.

#6

Thank you for putting this together.

#7

Interesting… I have data history turn on for all my cubes, and when I tried this on one of my Ad Hoc reports I get nothing… a blank screen.

#8

Hey Jerry,

That may be because you are clicking at a total level? The cell that you select has to be at a leaf level. If you are looking at a budgeted member combination at a parent level or higher level, you won’t see it. Make sure to drill down and click on Data History at lowest level where the data resides.

If you are still experiencing issues, I would recommend submitting a support ticket to speak with one of our consultants. I hope this helps!

1 Like
#9

Thank you for the tip! This feature proves valuable during our budget cycle, allowing us to track the history of member field changes, including the date and user name. More interesting is, it reveals how the data was updated in this field, whether through a spread, a defined process, or a template calculation.

1 Like
#10

Great tip. Thanks for sharing

#11

Thank you for the tip

#12

Excellent tip! I am turning it on now.

1 Like
#13

I tried to use a linked template but because my template was already line level details i didnt try this but great tip, WIll use in my next reproting

1 Like
#14

Thank you for sharing this.

#15

This is very useful feature

#16

I use this feature a lot and it’s helpful to determine who has made which changes to certain cells. I often find it helpful also when troubleshooting issues when users insist that they’ve made changes…those changes might have been overridden by another user after that, or sometimes they just didn’t realize that they’d saved a typo.

There are a few unfortunate limitations/constraints to Data History that I hope get added to the product some day soon:

  1. Infoflexes and other process operations aren’t supported, so (as mentioned in the article) it applies only to manual changes made by humans since the last process operation.
  2. There’s no way to export this data or import it, so if you have a template working with staging accounts that update other accounts, or via formulas, we can’t export/import into the reporting accounts from the source accounts, so the history isn’t available.
  3. There’s no way to report on this data…it’s 100% manual requiring a real human to right click on the cell and view it in real time. I’d love a feature to be able to produce an audit report for all cells in a dataview or template, to include in a report binder or just to be able to view at-a-glance rather than having to check each cell interactively.
1 Like
#17

Keep the tips coming!

#18

Great tip! Thanks for sharing

#19

I will definitely turn this option on.