Data Validation With Intacct Smart Rules

• November 4, 2015
• Kathy Jastrzebski

Financial reports are only as good as the integrity of the data they are based on.

Data integrity is vital. If data is incorrect, you risk basing huge financial decisions on incorrect information. The problem with achieving data integrity is that there are often a variety of people entering data (some more detail oriented than others). (Unfortunately, as much as my inner control freak would like to, there is no way to check each task a person does). Therefore, it’s hard to maintain the accuracy and consistency of the data. That’s when Intacct Smart Rules come in handy! They place real-time rules (warnings or errors) within the system, helping remove inevitable user mistakes without you having to check everything. (It’s as if the user has a little guardian angel sitting on their shoulder telling them when they forgot to enter some piece of information.)

In this example, we will go through the steps necessary to create a Smart Rule which will prevent a user from continuing (creates an “Error”) if the Sales Rep field is left blank on a customer record.

Creating a Smart Rule

Step 1: Navigation

“Customization Services” tab > Smart Rules > Add

Step 2: Object to extend

The first screen you’ll see will ask in what area of Intacct you’d like to add the rule to (Object to Extend). Click the drop down and select where you are adding the rule. In our example it will be “Customer”.

Step 3: Rule properties

Then, you’ll be brought to this screen where you’ll define the rule properties:

• Type – Either “Error” or “Warning” (an error does not allow a user to proceed until the conditions are met, while a warning allows them to proceed but shows a warning).
• Events – “Add”, “Set”, or “Delete”. This is when you want the error to occur (Add means if a customer is added and the conditions aren’t met, then we won’t be able to add the customer. It’s important to take into consideration if Customers are being synced from an external system (ie SalesForce) and the Sales Rep field is not something that is filled out before the sync, you will receive an error. I chose “Set” because I only want the error to happen once the customer has already been added and someone wants to change something about the record.)
• Conditions – This is under what conditions you want the error or warning to occur. Writing conditions was the hardest part for me to grasp. So let me take you step by step through this.

First you need to know where to find the Object Catalog.

Navigation: Customization Services > Overview > Catalog

Which will bring you to a list of Objects within Intacct:

Our Object Name is “CUSTOMER” and the Field is “CUSTREPID”

Writing the condition: Intacct has a list of Injection Parameters (which is pretty much just fancy wording for the format which you need to write the condition in).

(*Image from Intacct online Customization Services manual:https://www.intacct.com/ia/docs/userguides/UG3.09%20Customization%20Services.pdf)

The first part of our Condition will be: {!CUSTOMER.CUSTREPID!}

Now we want to tell Intacct under what conditions we want the error to occur. I want it to happen when the field is left blank. Using this table from Intacct’s website:

So that we write: {!CUSTOMER.CUSTREPID!} == ” “

• Error Message – This can be anything you want. I chose to be polite and professional and say: “Please fill out the the Sales Rep field” but of course you can say anything you want … (I suggest saying something like “Fill out the Sales Rep field NOW! Otherwise self-destruct will commence in 3 … 2 … “). Might as well have a little fun!

Step 4: Save

The final step is saving the rule. The only tricky thing here is the name. It cannot have spaces (or special characters).

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