Additional Reference Information Overview

Reference tables make a variety of reference information available to users through reports and in documents for use as deliverables and activities. Reference tables are also used to import data, such as resources and project links into Accolade. Reference tables not only contain standard reference information, such as cost tables and specification sheets, but can contain currency conversion rates, strategic corporate targets or limits, and even custom terms that you might want to expose in documents using the REFTABLE field code.

Administrators and Process Designers upload the initial version of a table to Accolade and assign an owner to the table. The owner maintains the table and updates it as necessary. Later versions of tables can be uploaded manually or automatically. Most reference tables are spreadsheet files either created manually using the Accolade Office Extensions add-in, or using online reports. Accolade also supports uploading reference tables in CSV and XML files, both manually and automatically.

Using reference tables, you can:

  • Import data into Accolade - Use a set of paired reference tables to import large amounts of data into Accolade. Specifically, you can use named pairs of reference tables to import resources, pools, capacities, and demands; projects and project links; matrices; metric security; and security list information. See Import Project Data and Configuration Overview for more information.
  • Maintain currency conversions - Create a reference table that contains the date-specific exchange rates for the currencies your company uses. As exchange rates change, the reference table manager can add additional rows to subsequent versions of the table while still preserving the exchange rates for prior dates. See Defining the Currencies Used in Your Company for more information.
  • Include data in deliverables and activities - Display individual reference table values in deliverables or activities using Accolade field codes with the REFTABLE source. To display correctly, these tables must have unique values in each row of the first column of the table so that the row can be identified in the code. In addition, it is possible to display an entire reference table in a deliverable or activity.

Reference Table Security

Each reference table is added to an access group so it uses that access group's security. Like security for projects, security for reference tables affects the data that displays in reports and what displays in Search results:

  • Users can only refresh a report containing a reference table if they have the rights to the table.
  • Users can only see the content of reference table field code if they have access rights to the table.

The access group security does not extend to the creation and ownership of a reference table. It is possible for a Reference Table Managers to be assigned to tables that they do not have access rights to, although this would usually be poor practice as the manager could not view table contents in reports.

If automatic uploading of reference table versions is enabled, the security of the ultimate source of the new versions must be configured outside of Accolade, by controlling which users have access to the local and remote file locations used for upload.

See the following to get started: