When Accounts Go "Missing" After Upload

When Accounts Go "Missing", Check Classifications

As mentioned in our  Classifications Guide, there are a couple of special classifications in CFO Scoreboard that are intended to remove accounts from the normal flow of calculations that CFO Scoreboard otherwise performs.

If you ever notice that certain accounts "go missing" within a certain company, you may want to check on these to determine whether the missing accounts were accidentally set to  Total or Heading. More detail on this, below.

Special Classifications

While we have noted that the majority of classification types can be used and modified totally at-will, there are two to be very careful with:  Total and Heading. Both of these are designed basically to let CFO Scoreboard ignore certain spreadsheet rows that can be safely discarded. Once you set an account to either of these classifications, you will not be able to change, or recover them.

Here's some detail on the rationale behind each classification:

1. Total
   For most accounting systems, when you export a P&L or Balance Sheet, each account group and sub-group will have a line at the bottom of the group that says something like "Total XYZ" or "Net XYZ". While these totals are useful when you're looking at the reports directly, they are NOT something you want CFO Scoreboard to retain during the import process. CFO Scoreboard actually calculates all these totals  internally already. So if we were to import them as well as the "regular" accounts during the upload process, CFO Scoreboard would effectively double most of the accounting figures in your statements. Obviously this would be grossly inaccurate.
   
   As a result, CFO Scoreboard will  by default totally discard these rows. If it finds account names that start with "Total" and the name matches a previous heading or parent account, then that account will not show on the Classify Accounts Screen. CFO Scoreboard throws it out automatically, and it does not contribute to your numbers.
   
   If however some accounts of yours DO make it through this filtering process and still show up on the Classify Accounts screen, you'd want to classify them as  Total. Doing this will ensure that CFO Scoreboard discards them from its computations. However you'll want to make sure NOT to use this classification if you think that you'll need CFO Scoreboard to actually use data from these rows.
2. Heading
   Sometimes the  hierarchy that's included in a spreadsheet is not the kind that CFO Scoreboard can pick up automatically. In these cases you'll see "accounts" on the Classify Accounts screen that are not really accounts, but instead are more like group names or section headers. In these cases you'll want to give CFO Scoreboard a little help and manually classify these accounts as Heading. Doing this produces a similar effect to using the Total classification -- CFO Scoreboard will disregard all the financial information from these accounts. The difference is that whereas Total will make the account completely disappear from the chart of accounts, setting classification to Heading will still show the account in the list, but there will be no drop-down handle next to it, and no data pulled from that row in the spreadsheet.

In both of these cases, whether setting to Total or Heading, the account will disappear from CFO Scoreboard's calculations and analysis.  The only way to get these accounts "back" is to rename them as something new in your spreadsheets, and re-uploading the data again. Doing so will force CFO Scoreboard to "ask" for a classification again, since these new accounts will be un-recognized. Keep in mind that all it takes here is to make a one-character change in the account name. Something as simple as adding the suffix "- new" would do it.