What dates patterns do we recognize?
Our parser recognizes a lot of date formats, and the list is always growing. We'll add an exhaustive list here at a later time, but for now you should be able to count on all these formats:
- January 20th 2015
- January 20 2015
- Jan 20 2015
- 20 Jan
- Jan 2015
- January 2015
- 2015 January
- 1/20/15
- 1/20/2015
Other things to keep in mind:
- Keep in mind that the day of the month really is not important to CFO Scoreboard. On an income statement each column should contain the entire record of transactions for the whole month. On the balance sheet, CFOS assumes that the balances were generated on the last day of the month, but it really doesn't matter what day of the month each balance came from. As long as they are consistently taken on the (e.g) 1st, 15th, last day, or what have you, all of the math and optics within CFO Scoreboard will still function as usual.
This means, if you're having trouble with dates in a spreadsheets, just convert a couple of the columns to the format January 2015 (our personal favorite) and then click and drag to extend that pattern to all other columns. - Be wary of European or continental date formats -- we have support for some of them, but not all, because for instance it is not possible for CFOS to automatically "know" whether 5/6/14 refers to May 6th or June 5th. Since most of our users are in North America, CFOS will assume 5/6 == May 6th. If your European or foreign client is having trouble getting dates parsed correctly, you may consider quickly converting their 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.
- 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.