00. Use a "Sandbox" Company for Testing
It's Important to Have a Sandbox
Whether you're running tech support, trying to learn a new system, or developing something new, it's always great to have a test area of your own. In order to complete the exercises that follow in the next section, we would highly recommend creating a test Company record within CFO Scoreboard.
To do this, just log into your account, click your name in the top-right, and go to Settings >> Companies >> Add Company, then fill out the requisite fields. It is not important what you mark as the Industry or Accounting System.
Why You Need to Upload Some Financials
The next step before you can proceed with our exercises is to add some data to your new company. Why do we need to do this?
Under normal circumstances, when a CFO Scoreboard user attempts to upload, and the software reaches an error, he/she will arrive at what we call the Whoops page. It looks like this:
As you go through these exercises you will get very familiar with the content that shows in that bottom box -- because that's where the software tells you what went wrong!
However, if a CFO Scoreboard user has never uploaded before, the behavior is different: the whoops page changes to look like this:
We call this the Whoops bypass page, because for first-time users we skip the normal error message and just send a help ticket directly to our support team. You may also have realized by now that if you hit the Whoops bypass page, it will not help you resolve the issue, because the most critical information (about the error) has been hidden from you.
We don't want that.
Upload Sample Data
To avoid this and get to see the useful error message every time, just upload these sample files into your new company:
Once you're done there, your Reports page should light up with a bunch of data. Great!
You are now ready to proceed to Demonstration #1. Good luck!