Data Auditing in SAP BusinessObjects Cloud for Planning

Data Auditing in Cloud for Analytics logs all the changes to the transaction data in any model that enables data auditing. The audit data is logged when data is published from a private version. All changed cells in the published version will be audited. The audit information for each changed cell includes the following:

• Date and time of the change
• User who made the change
• Original value
• New value

This is a neat little feature to allow tracking of who changed what and when. The ability to track changes, particularly for planning is a capability which is often required.

The model’s preferences allows us to set the Data Audit to on.

In this particular example I created a basic planning model with the data audit option checked. As the model was created manually and I didn’t load any data (actuals or budgets) I created a private version (for Budget Version 1). My story was then ready for me to start inputting some planning data.

After entering my planning data I then published this BudV1 version (effectively committing my version of the planned values to update the main BudV1 version). We can then go the Data Changes area and after selecting the model we wish to view the data changes that had taken place. Here we are only seeing the default columns of the model and we do have the ability to change the columns we want to see, along with the ability to apply filtering.

Going through some further changes and publishing we see a history of the changes start to build up.

At the moment it’s only possible to view the data changes in this monitor. Moving forward it would be beneficial if we could consume this audit data in our dashboards (stories) along with the planning data itself. Like my previous blog looking at the planning input tasks, data auditing is a nice little out of the box functionality that is very easy to work with.