Using Effective-Dated Grids and Scroll Areas

Many scroll areas and grids are controlled by an effective date and an effective-dated status. These scrolls can have two values: active and inactive. The active and inactive values enable you to keep a complete history of data for every value that you add. In most cases, you never want to delete a value; you only make it inactive. Thus, you can retain a complete history of all your data and table values—whether you changed them two years ago or want them to go into effect in two months—for trend analysis and other historical reports.

With all this information at your fingertips, you can roll back your system to a particular point from which you can perform analyses or projections for your company. You can also maintain all data on your employees as it changes over time.

For example, when going through the employee review process, you should maintain records of past reviews so that you can refer to them to see how an employee has improved over time. Then, as employee review time arrives again, you simply add a new row of data to the table by clicking the Add button rather than by typing over the existing row. When you add a new row, the system automatically populates the Effective Date field with the system date, which is usually today’s date. You can keep this date or change it to a future date if the information that you are entering does not take effect until later.

Because the system date is at or after the new effective-dated row that you created, the new information becomes the current row, and the previous row becomes historical information. If you returned to this page and clicked the Update/Display button, which displays only current and future rows, you would see only the last data row that you entered. If you also wanted to see older data rows, you would have to click the Include History button.

To correct incorrect data already in the system, click the Correct History button. (You should take this approach rather than inserting a row with corrected data.)