What Kinds of Dates Can CFO Scoreboard Recognize?
Our upload tool recognizes a lot of date formats, and the list is always growing. You should be able to count on using any of these formats in your documents:
- January 20th 2015
- January 20 2015
- Jan 20 2015
- Jan 2015
- January 2015
- 2015 January
- 1/20/15
- 1/20/2015
Does it matter what day of the month is shown?
The day of the month is not important to CFO Scoreboard. On any income statement, each column should contain the entire record of transactions for the whole month, so the day is irrelevant. On any balance sheet, CFO Scoreboard assumes that the balances were generated on the last day of the month. But as long as the dates are consistently taken on the same day each month, all of the math and optics within CFO Scoreboard will still function as usual.
What about European / international date formats?
If you are using European or non-North American conventions for your dates, be careful! We have support for some of these patterns, but not all. This is because it isn't possible for CFO Scoreboard to "know" what date is being described in certain cases.
For instance, consider this date: 5/6/14
Just by looking at that pattern, it isn't clear whether this refers to May 6th, or June 5th! But, since most of our users are in North America, CFO Scoreboard will assume that 5/6 means May 6th. If you're with a European or international firm, you may want to consider quickly converting your dates to the same format noted above (e.g January 2015, February 2015, etc.) in order to eliminate the ambiguity and get a clean import. This can be done very quickly in Excel!
What about the cell format?
If you're having inexplicable date problems during import, pay attention to cell format within Excel. Generally dates should be in the format TEXT if they're written out by hand. If they're exported from an accounting system in a numeric format such as 1/20/2015, then they'll be formatted as DATE, and usually that's just fine as well.