Data quality is an issue the majority of our clients run into. It’s hard to know where to start sometimes and can feel like a mountain to climb.  Getting your placement data right, including changes and extensions, should be your base camp to improve your financial reporting and overall data-set, so it’s time to make it a priority!

Bullhorn’s placement approval process is a tool that will arm you with the control you need to make the process watertight. When your consultants submit placements, a nominated person can then approve or reject this (this could be their manager, back office, finance etc) and once the placement is set to approved it “locks”,  meaning no further changes can be made without Change Requests or special permissions.

Why use Change Requests to improve financial reporting?

Change Request can be used for 2 different things, Modifications and Extensions

  • Modifications: once a placement has been approved, you should no longer be editing the main placement edit page. All changes (correcting rates, start/end dates etc) should be done using Change Requests. The person requesting the change will have to fill out the Change Request “form” and specify what is changing and why. This will then go through an approval process again and you’ll end up with a full audit trail. 
  • Extensions: as with modifications, using Change Requests for extensions will give you a full audit trail but another key reason for logging extensions via Change Requests is that you want to make sure you can track the original data vs the extension data. If you have a placement running from the 1st of April 2020 until the 30th of April 2021 and you are extending this by another year, you want to make sure the original data stays as is. If you were to edit the placement via the original placement/ edit tab – it will look as if your placement has been running for 2 years straight. Often the rates will change as well after an extension, you wouldn’t want the new rate applied to the entire placement record (original and extension), you only want this applied to the extension. Change Requests with a type of ‘Extension’ will let you do this. 

There is a second, less common, way of logging extensions that cube19 supports as well. This is using Bullhorn’s copy placement module. This will let you copy the original placement and will pre-populate a number of fields. This is a Bullhorn add-on that is configured depending on your requirements. For cube19 it is important that the original (or previous) placement’s ID is stored on the extension. 

A few things to be aware of:

  • Don’t use the placement edit tab to make changes as this will apply to the full placement
  • The placement approval process will give you more control over your placement data quality
  • Modifications and Extensions are treated differently on our side. Bill/ pay changes should be mapped in as modifications and extensions should have a dedicated type 
  • When using Change Requests for extensions, make sure you use the Effective Date as the new start date

Top tip: sometimes a deal might happen out of hours or over the weekend which might make it land in the next week’s stats. You can get the ‘Edit Placement Date Added’ permission turned on by Bullhorn. This will allow you to edit the placement date added so you can make sure it falls in the correct week/month/quarter. This is also used a lot by new clients and clients that are having a big push on data quality. You can add multiple placements in a day and make sure they show correctly both in Bullhorn and cube19.