Monday, August 27, 2012

Equity Edge: Saving a Copy of Expense Allocation - Recognition - Audit Export View

How many of you who are Equity Edge users consistently save off a copy of your Audit Export view of the Expense Allocation - Recognition report EACH reporting period?

If not, I'd highly recommend you get into the habit, it will ease things greatly if/when you ever get into a circumstance where you have to "prove out" how the estimated forfeiture rate was being applied to your expense.

We are helping a client convert systems and this very sort of question has arisen, but of course the client doesn't have the supporting detail from their old system, only the summary and can only show the forfeiture rate applied at the group level. We can still get the job done, but the soft copies of the details of the application of the forfeiture rate would reduce the amount of effort significantly.

This "Audit Export" report view feature was added in 7.0 or 7.1, I can't remember which. And is a terrific tool for a wide variety of reasons. You can audit nearly ALL of the report calculations with the data on the report. And the exceptions to that "almost all" rule are very rare exceptions. No more "black box" expensing, you can see exactly HOW and WHY Equity Edge calculated the expense that it did. Easy, peasy, lemon-squeezy.

If you have leading zeros on your grant numbers:
Remember to save the export into CSV format, not XLS or XLSX. Then rename the CSV to a .TXT extension before you open it will Excel so that the Text to Data wizard will open automatically and you can then specify the "text" data type for the Number column so that you preserve those leading zeros on your grant numbers.

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