How to read Tideswell's numbers and dates

Most "this number looks wrong" moments in Tideswell turn out to be a reading problem rather than a data problem. A figure on a Tideswell screen is in a currency you were not expecting, or a blank is being read as a zero, or a date range covers a different stretch of days than you assumed. This page covers all three, wherever a figure appears: the store dashboard, a purchase order, or a field on a record.

Some of it also decides how you build. Where a rule affects a field you are adding to an Object, one of the kinds of record your team defines in Settings › Objects, this page says so and points at What is an Object?.

Which currency is a figure in?

Whichever currency that figure belongs to, and Tideswell always says which. Figures from your store are in your connected store's currency.

A purchase order is in the currency recorded on the supplier. Amounts you record yourself on your own Objects use your workspace's home currency.

Two consequences are worth holding on to.

• A supplier's currency is copied onto an order when the order is created. Change the currency on the supplier afterwards and old orders keep the currency they were written in, because history should not re-price itself. Fairgreen Golf Co. buying from Portside Mills in euros still reads euros on last season's orders after Portside switches to dollars.
• Amounts in different currencies are never added together. Where a total covers orders in more than one currency, you get one figure per currency, side by side. A supplier's order history, the purchase order book and receipt history all behave this way. There is no invisible conversion happening behind a single number.

When you add a money field to an Object yourself, the amount you type replaces whatever was there before rather than adjusting it. That makes a Money field right for a price or a quoted cost and wrong for a running balance that something subtracts from. Plan your fields before you add them covers choosing between the types, and it is worth reading before you save the field, because a field's type is fixed once it exists.

What does a blank or a dash mean?

That the figure is not known, which is different from being zero. Tideswell will not print a zero it cannot stand behind.

A blank or a dash means nothing was recorded, or the figure could not be read. A zero means the answer is genuinely nothing.

You will meet this rule in several places, and it always means the same thing.

• A gross margin is blank for a product with no cost recorded, because "we do not know the cost" is not the same as "this product makes no margin".
• A quantity confirmed by a supplier is blank until they confirm. Blank means nobody has answered yet; a confirmed zero means they have told you they are sending none.
• A discrepancy on a delivery stays blank until something actually arrives.
• A card that could not load its figures shows a dash or a short "failed to load" line rather than a zero.
• On a track record, an outcome that could not be judged shows a dash, not 0%, because "missed everything" and "nothing was measurable" are different results.
• In a record's history, a value that was empty reads as the word "empty".

So when a figure matters, look at whether it is blank or zero before you act on it. If it is blank, the question to ask is what has not been recorded yet.

How fresh is the number you are looking at?

Tideswell tells you, wherever a figure is worked out in the background rather than read live. The store dashboard carries an "Updated 4 minutes ago" stamp next to a Refresh button, and pressing Refresh recomputes it there and then instead of using the recent copy.

Worked-out fields on a record do the same in miniature. Each one carries a short line underneath it. It reads "calculated 5m ago" when it is current, "last checked 2h ago, may be out of date" when it might have moved, and "Not calculated yet" on a record you created moments ago.

If a calculation could not run, you get a plain-English reason in place of the number rather than a stale number sitting there looking authoritative. A field that works itself out covers setting those up, and How to add and edit a record covers reading them on a record.

One more honesty signal to learn: a card that says its figures are "based on the most recent orders only" is telling you the scan reached its ceiling and older history was not included. Read that line when you see it rather than assuming every card covers all time.

Which dates and times is Tideswell using?

Yours. Times are shown and interpreted in the timezone your browser reports, so a delivery date, a scheduled banner and your quiet hours all read in local time without you setting anything. Quiet hours are captured in whatever timezone you were in when you saved them.

Dates come in two shapes, and the difference matters when you build an Object. A Date field holds a single day, which is right for a delivery date or a launch day.

A Date and time field holds a day and a time, which is right for an appointment or a cutoff. Chat and activity feeds show relative times instead, such as "2h ago", and hovering gives you the exact moment.

Elsewhere, dates behave the way you would hope. Task lists group into Overdue, Today, This week, Later and No due date. A project timeline draws a Today line.

A repeating task lands at nine in the morning unless you set a time on it. See How to search, filter and save a view for narrowing a record list by a date range.

What does a date range actually cover?

On the store dashboard, one picker drives every card on the page, and it offers three different kinds of period. Knowing which kind you have picked is what stops two people comparing numbers that were never the same thing.

• A rolling window counts backwards from today. "Last 30 days" is always thirty days long.
• A calendar period is a whole finished week, month, quarter or year, with fixed boundaries. "Last month" is that month entire, not the last thirty days.
• A period to date is the current week, month, quarter or year so far, so it always ends today and grows as the period goes on.

The Include today tick shifts a rolling window rather than lengthening it. With it on, "Last 7 days" ends today; with it off, it ends yesterday.

Either way it is seven days. That is deliberately different from how some other tools count, so if a figure here does not match a figure elsewhere, check this box first.

Every up or down arrow on the dashboard compares your window against the equal-length stretch immediately before it. Pick a 90-day window and the arrow is comparing it against the 90 days before that, not against last year.

How do you read a percentage, a reference number and a worked-out value?

A Percent field is a share out of 100, shown with its sign. It is the right type for a margin or a discount, rather than a plain number that a reader has to interpret. A Number field is anything you count.

A Reference number counts up on its own and is stamped on the record when it is first saved, with a short prefix taken from the Object's name. A repair at Fairgreen Golf Co. becomes RPR-1042.

Nobody types it, so it is safe to quote in an email to a factory. See Choice lists and reference numbers.

A worked-out value is marked as calculated wherever it appears, is never editable by anyone, and carries the freshness line described above. On a record list, money, number, percent, count and calculated columns are lined up on the right so the digits stack, which makes a column of amounts scannable at a glance. How to find and open your records covers the list itself, and Tideswell glossary defines the terms used here.