Automations are a great way to keep your stakeholders informed of data relevant to them, whether it is any of the different monitoring or collaboration use cases we’ve listed in this article. We interviewed a few of our internal Pigment SAs and asked them about their favorite uses to help modelers.
Mappings, Mappings Mappings!
I hope y’all are sitting down for this but I’m gonna let you in on a industry secret… sometimes data isn’t exactly the cleanest and when its imported into Pigment, there can be mappings missed, which can impact downstream calculations.
Automations are a great way to be notified if a new entity is added without currency, or maybe you’ve added a new GL Account is added but its not mapped to a P&L category. In both of these cases, you can create an automation attached to a monitoring Metric.
How to identify missed mappings?
The key is identifying the blanks. Create a monitoring Metric using the COUNTBLANKSOF function to identify the number of blanks in key Metrics, or Transactions properties. Next, set up an automation that will direct you to either the validation board.
Use a filter on the transaction list or Metric to only show blanks for easier validation.
This works for any mapping, it can be leveraged by admin boards used to set up user access.
Any time Members input or import data, where there shouldn’t be blanks, you can easily catch this before impacting any other data.
Switchover reminder
We all know how hectic the end of the month and closing time are, so why not set a nice reminder for yourself when you need to adjust your switchover date? You simply need to set up a monitoring Metric to identify if an imported month is greater than the last switchover.
How to set switchover reminder?
To identify a switchover needs to be updated, you’ll need to identify the last month that has been imported and compare when that is not the same as your switchover Metric.
Assuming that is coming in from a Transactions list, your formula will look something like this.
Transactionlist.month premove lastnonblank: transactionlist] <> switchovermonthmetric
Budget scenario is not equal to a previous value
This is a great way to utilize both the Metric to Metric importing as well as automations. No need to use the native Snapshot functionality, simply create a copy of the budget data you wish to monitor and create a variance comparing that data to your current budget scenario. Your new Variance Metric will be the one you use to set up the automation.
Your Variance metric will use a formula similar to this.
previousvaluemetric tremove: all dimensions but month] <> livemetric iremove: all dimension but month]
Automations can be used for more than just monitoring data values for end users. They are a great tool that can help model builders monitor data that needs to be validated, as well as processes and user access.
We’d love to hear about your different uses of automations! Please comment below.