Maintain Data Quality Using Exception Reports

0:00 – Introduction to Exception Reports
Hey, greetings everyone! Dominic for another ‘How I Solved It With Klient’! I want to talk about exception reports now and how they are a key tool to maintain data quality in your system. So we do have access to a myriad, a notion of information these days. We are bringing everything on the same system which is great, but how do we keep focus and how do we have access to key information that needs to be addressed right now? How do we identify process blockers or things that might be an issue, so that we have a process that runs smoothly and we address or tackle potential problems with our customer before they become one? And then how do we provide visibility on critical tasks that need to be addressed? So these are just a few challenges obviously, that can eventually be addressed using exception reports.

0:52 – What are Exception Reports?
And what do I mean by the exception report? It’s really just a report that focuses on an hour type of things. In this case I’m showing the example of billable milestones. So you’re doing project management, you have some deliverables. There might be a gate or a key date that needs to be tracked, a project go-live, or some delivery approval that are attached to a payment. So here I’m looking at only milestones from our project. So it’s a subset of tasks within all my tasks that I have in my system. And I’m looking only at tasks that are overdue. So my due date is in the past, so something needs to be done about that. Or if my status is not complete. So if they are in the past and not completed, either I need to change the date and reschedule and address the issue with the customer or whomever is dependent on that milestone to be completed. Or I update the status because it was actually completed, but it was not marked as such. So that’s an exception report.

1:59 – Benefits of Exception Reports
Looking across all my information just to find some key information that we need to address, that we might have an issue with, have a challenge managing it. So in this case, we can use or review that information obviously as a report itself. Another neat thing that I like to do often is to use the ‘Subscribe’ button on reports in Salesforce where you can have that scheduled, sent over to you. It could be sent only if there are actually records in there, so you just send me the report if there are records, if there is more than one. So that also serves as an alert. I love that feature, especially when we’re doing a pilot or trying to find solutions to address a process before we fully automate things. I like to use the ‘Subscribe’ on reports, to address that. And obviously, those exception reports should be used and leveraged also on dashboards. So if you want to provide that visibility and generate accountability to people, you should expose that and review them as a team.

2:52 – Practical Example: Pre-Invoicing
So here the example is pre-invoicing, so finance, accounting. They’re looking into generating new invoices, they want to make sure that everything is up to date. Overdue billable milestones is going to be key for them. So they will want to look with their PMs and make sure that there are actions taken to correct the information. So reschedule or mark as complete so that we can go on the rest of the process.

3:39 – Summary of Benefits
Benefits, obviously, just to summarize my thoughts here: We want to create team alignment and visibility by using those exception reports, bringing focus to people so that we stimulate accountability. People will tend to make sure that they maintain their information. If we keep on looking into those exception reports in the team meetings, it’s going to build some habits, doing so.

4:02 – Conclusion
So hopefully you find some value into this trick here, using exception reports to have better visibility over your information. Thanks, you have a great day!