One note about row notes. You can’t copy row notes from one version to the other, but you can copy comments and line item schedules. We use a “working projection” and copy that to a backup quarterly to match what we present to the board. We didn’t realize the copy function didn’t copy the row notes and people have updated the row notes in the working projection since, so we lost some history there and have to jump through some hoops to copy the row notes that are there from the working projection to the quarterly archive.
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@jeanette.emery, just checking in to see if you’ve found that using comments instead of row notes has worked for your company. Any further learning experiences you can share?
We are using row notes now for our monthly variance analysis and it is working well for that purpose. For our finance team, we have a report that gives the financials with a column for this month’s row note, last month’s row note, and the annual row note. This allows our team to see what was driving the variance last month when writing up the comments for this month and gives them a space to define the effect of permanent variances. There is no history to row notes, so this is why we ended up using the current month note each month (vs. perpetually using the annual note). The row notes can be overwritten by any person with data access to Prophix and does not track who said what, so the Comments have the advantage there.
We use comments when we have worksheets to attach or questions that require a back and forth we want to archive. I also use it to archive when certain updates are made, like monthly revenue adjustments, so there is a date/time stamp.
The only issue we have had with row notes is that they do not copy when you copy a scenario. We set up a working projection where the finance team can work with our budget owners to revise the projection on an ongoing basis as they review the monthly financials. When we are ready to review before our board meetings, we copy the working projection version into a Q2 Board Projection version and use that one for board reporting/comments to the board. The row notes do not copy with the version, so we lose that piece of the puzzle (or I have to manually copy/paste every row note from one version to the next). I’ve gotten around this by exporting a copy of the board report to Excel, so I can reference the Excel version. It takes more time, and because there is a max of how many pages can be exported, I have to generate several exports (vs. running one report for all). And it isn’t available in Prophix, which is unfortunate.
I hope this helps you on your journey!
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Very helpful, @jeanette.emery. Thanks so much for going into so much detail. This is giving me some great design ideas, but there are certainly some limitations!
Glad to help!
One new thing I found out this week. We copy our version to our “quarterly budget” in pieces, because we do our meetings over the course of a few weeks. When we copied a piece of a version (and not the entire version), we couldn’t copy over the line item schedules and comments. Apparently this functionality only works when you copy the whole version.
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