Dates Found in Account Name(s)

Once a while, a user's statements may include account names that look like dates when CFO Scoreboard parses the file. When this happens, you'll get a date-related error of some kind. When this happens, you'll need to convince the user that the account needs to be renamed in some form. This one is a little tricky, but here's some language to help:

It looks like your account [ACCOUNT NAME] in your [ IS or BS] is being mistakenly understood by our system as containing a date, which is causing a problem when CFO Scoreboard tries to intake the rest of the data in the spreadsheets.

The reason this happens is because our uploader is designed to be extremely flexible and adaptive to every accounting system out there. However, this means that it can sometimes find dates in unexpected places.

We recommend rephrasing the name of this account slightly so that it won't be understood as a date anymore -- something like [EXAMPLE MODIFIED NAME] would work great. If you're able to make this a permanent change within your books, that would be even better! If not, then you'll simply have to remember to re-make this change in Excel, each month when you upload new statements.

When you make your "example", usually all you have to do is add something to the front of the account name, so that the first thing that the parser sees couldn't possibly be a date. For instance once we saw a liability account named September 2011. We simply changed this to Loan - September 2011, and that was enough to get it past the uploader cleanly. Make sure to do your own testing using a sample company, to be sure.