Spot-Checking Record Type Agreement against Expectations

When we last left ZoHo’s cloud-based Business Intelligence tool

it was with the promise –or was it a threat? — of coming back to discuss matters honestly.  To jar your memory, here is the screenshot of the counts of record types:

Annotated ZoHo Reporting
red needs further investigation
green is exactly or almost exactly as one would expect
yellow is pretty good
oh, provided you’re using a non-free account, it’s basically one-click publishing of your data. Take that, SharePoint 2013!

 

the power of summary functions
the power of summary functions

 

So, going row by row:

  • University Alum Club has slightly more contacts than organizations — and that’s fine.  From Columbia Business School (henceforth “CBS”) Club’s perspective, anyone in the file who’s an alum of another club is likely either a programming partner (in which case they should more likely be affiliated with that club’s Board – but that’s not universally true) or if not a subject matter expert helping us with programming development, s/he attended one of our events, we got some money from them, and aggregating those (relatively small) sums at their club level is as defensible a way as any — and might help us track who to be extra solicitous towards.
  • Alumni Club Head Hierarchies are a placeholder mechanism meant to unify relationships among clubs as is seen here.  These records don’t represent anything real in the world — they’re just a convenient way to encode a hierarchical relationship in the database.
  • The other MBA clubs seem sound enough — (though truth be told there are a surprisingly large number of clubs, so I’ll have to go double check that with some troubleshooting).  But logically those MBA club’s members/public would be the most likely of any alumni to attend my programming, so it would only stand to reason that they would be accumulating many more members with attendance and/or revenue association with them for each organization I tracked.
  • The CBS Alumni case is actually the weakest – and that phenomenon has two causes. But I’ll return to that explanation, which is lengthier, after I finish up the other lines.