Is there any way to make Cognos go back in time without a date field?

[Ariana]

I am in need of a way to make Cognos go back in time without a date field to use. At my place of employment, we will soon not have the use of a program that had a huge library of reports. My concern is that when being audited by a government agency, they will request balances as of a certain date. Since there would be no date field to use in this situation, I am at a loss to how to create a report that goes back in time.
Thanks,
Ari

[Lynn]

I am in need of a way to make Cognos go back in time without a date field to use. At my place of employment, we will soon not have the use of a program that had a huge library of reports. My concern is that when being audited by a government agency, they will request balances as of a certain date. Since there would be no date field to use in this situation, I am at a loss to how to create a report that goes back in time.
Thanks,
Ari

You will need a flux capacitor and 1.21 gigawatts of power.  ;D

I don't understand how it is possible not to have a date field. It doesn't seem that any system subject to government audit would be compliant with applicable regulations if it does not have dates associated with transactions.

Cognos, in most situations, is not a repository for data. It simply points to places where data lives and makes it available for analysis and reporting. If the data living in those places has no date information then this isn't really a Cognos challenge.

Preserving snapshots and defined intervals would be the only way I can see to do what you are describing ... unless you can find a flux capacitor.

[BigChris]

The tricky part is going to be getting your server up to 88 mph...that's going to need quite an extension cable

[MFGF]

You will need a flux capacitor and 1.21 gigawatts of power.  ;D

The tricky part is going to be getting your server up to 88 mph...that's going to need quite an extension cable

:D That made my day! Hilarious!

Ariana, I would have written what Lynn posted, apart from my reply wouldn't have been so clever or witty. If you don't have dates you can report on, how can you be expected to provide date-based reporting? If I was you I'd be pushing this internally as a non-compliance red flag, and see what the business rationale is behind expiry of the old system with no functional replacement available. If you start telling the business it puts them out of compliance, it may result in a re-think.

Good luck!

MF.

[Ariana]

Thanks for making fun of me. I really appreciate it as I enjoy being humiliated.

Apparently you all think this is a stupid question.

Our system does record an average balance so the data is being accumulated. However, being able to ascertain how this is being done is above my pay grade.

I can gather this information from 300+ page reports from an archaic reporting program.  I was hoping to avoid that but such is my fate.

[MFGF]

Thanks for making fun of me. I really appreciate it as I enjoy being humiliated.

Apparently you all think this is a stupid question.

Our system does record an average balance so the data is being accumulated. However, being able to ascertain how this is being done is above my pay grade.

I can gather this information from 300+ page reports from an archaic reporting program.  I was hoping to avoid that but such is my fate.

Hi Ariana,

We're neither making fun of you nor humiliating you, and I'm really sorry if we gave you this impression. It's not a stupid question, but it does require some pushback to the business on your part. You're being asked to deliver something you don't have the ability to provide, because the data available to you doesn't support it. If I was in that position, I'd be asking people above my pay grade why the data isn't available, and how it could be made available. This seems to be particularly important (and consequently likely to be taken seriously) since it involves audit non-compliance, which is a serious matter to any business.

Your system recording an average balance does seem to imply that dates are available somewhere. It's simply not possible for you to create historical reports without access to this date information, though. It's as simple as that.

MF.

[Lynn]

Thanks for making fun of me. I really appreciate it as I enjoy being humiliated.

Apparently you all think this is a stupid question.

Our system does record an average balance so the data is being accumulated. However, being able to ascertain how this is being done is above my pay grade.

I can gather this information from 300+ page reports from an archaic reporting program.  I was hoping to avoid that but such is my fate.

I have always appreciated that Cognoise is a place where there are many clever people to learn from and that we can all have some fun along the way.

You received some substantive advice here and I hope you can see that people are willing to engage in a conversation about your issue.

If you can find out more about how your systems work and the reporting environment available to you that can shed light on how time-based reporting could be achieved then there might be more for forum members to offer by way of advice.

[cognostechie]

I have always appreciated that Cognoise is a place where there are many clever people to learn from and that we can all have some fun along the way.

Yes, I used to think the same way until I got six negatives  ;) That being said, I enjoyed your humorous comments  :)

Our system does record an average balance so the data is being accumulated. However, being able to ascertain how this is being done is above my pay grade.

Ariana - If that is above your pay grade and your employer is not prepared to make any improvements, then why bother about the results of a future government audit? Won't that be above your pay grade too?

[bdbits]

Surely this reporting system is using a database as the source for the information. Is that database going away? Can you get at least temporary read access to it for a sufficient time to be able to extract and store the historical data into another database?

If not, another possibility might be running some detail reports that would have the information you need for a given set of date ranges, then archiving these reports, preferably in a storage media that would allow you to search them.

The people here are generally a great, helpful bunch. Sometimes we use humor that can get lost, perhaps due to cultural differences or exposure to different movies or literature. Nobody intended to make you feel humiliated or anything but inject a little humor into the situation.