Making Sure Dates Are Continuous
What should you do if CFO Scoreboard is finding gaps in your range of dates?
One of the key requirements for CFO Scoreboard is that your total set of data needs to be continuous. CFO Scoreboard will not work with a set of accounting figures that jump from (let's say) May 2012 to February 2013. All those months in between have to be filled in!
Here are the usual suspects for this one:
1. Make sure your data is continuous with what has already been uploaded
This is the big one! Not only do you need to make sure that there no gaps within your spreadsheet, but you need to make sure that the figures in your spreadsheet don't leave any gaps when they are added to your existing data. This obviously only applies if you have already uploaded before.
How can you tell what you've already uploaded? The easiest way is to go to the Trends >> Income Statement section. You can collapse all the columns on the screen and quickly see what months and years have been uploaded. Here we've uploaded 2011 to 2014:
This means anything we try to upload needs to connect with either the beginning of 2011, or the end of 2014. This spreadsheet would hit an error because it doesn't reach all the way to the beginning of 2011:
2. Confirm your column headers are consistent
Sometimes your dates are just perfect, except for one stray character that "interrupts" the pattern. CFO Scoreboard needs your date headers to be absolutely consistent and regular. Here's a list of the patterns we recognize. Just choose one of those! Here's an example of how even a well-formed set of dates can get thrown off:
3. Confirm there are no actual gaps in your Excel file
Sometimes despite your best intentions, a column gets misplaced. Don't do this!
See, March is missing entirely here. That's a no-no.
4. Make sure your income statement has no all-zero columns
If a column on the income statement has nothing but zeroes in it, CFO Scoreboard will not import that column. This will make CFO Scoreboard think there's a "gap" in your data, and you'll get an error. Here's an example:
Still having trouble?
No problem at all. If you've checked all these possibilities, tried to upload again, and it still won't work for you, just send an email to help@cfoscoreboard.com, and we'll assist you as soon as possible.