Robert, our new consolidation consultant, wants to:
- Get into the use of the Questions and Answers tool
- Understand how the Questions and Answers tool is set up.
The Questions and Answers feature is useful in business scenarios with the need for textual information in the final report, for example:
- provide auditors with contextual information on the consolidated figures
- deliver complementary information to the corporate financial reports
- meet sustainability reporting requirements
- enter notes to the annual statement
- add notes to sustainability
- write notes to integrated reports.
You can relate questions and answers to numbers shown in a form as shown in the above figure. This helps to:
- explain deviations or gaps
- provide supplemental information to a value on particular data cells (for example, particular financial statement item changes)
- share assessment of key figures.
In such a number-based scenario you can use visual controls including number-based conditions (for example, "If the threshold of 5% between numbers A and B is exceeded, please explain").
Questions and Answers are stored in BTP. Reuse of Questions and Answers in other forms is possible, for example, to set up a Monitoring.
Use case:
Users have to enter data in forms. Since we don’t have any automatic monitoring that validates if data was entered or not, the Questions and Answers feature could be used:
- within each form, containing the question "Did you finish entering data?". The users fill in the answer "Yes" or "No" and enter their name.
a monitoring form is set up in which the same questions and the same answer structure are selected. You will then get an overview of who already finished data entry and who has not.
Questions and Answers enable you to guide your contributors and get the textual responses from your units.
They can help improve the overall quality of your data, for example by asking for a sign-off or an assessment of the numbers provided.
When designing forms in the Manage Forms app you can add a question row or column on the Rows or Columns tabs of your Form Wizard and enter the question.
You can select an existing question, create a new question, or edit an existing question and save it as a new one. A question can have up to 5,000 characters and can include line breaks.
Note
You can have questions either in rows or columns, but not in both.
Once you've entered your questions, the answer icon is displayed in the cells that contain questions.
Choose the answer icon to open the cell view and in the Answers section, select the options for the answers.
The options available for the answers include the following:
- Select one if you want one answer to be collected.
- Select none if you don't want answers to be collected or displayed.
- Select from the available dimensions (for example: "Per FS Item") if you want to collect answers for the dimensions shown on the opposite axis.
When answers to questions are entered in the form in the Enter Package Data app, the question and the answers to that question are stored together.
If a question is reused in another form and the context is the same, the answers to that question are also retrieved. This re-use of questions saves time and enables the creation of overview forms.
The figure above shows another example of the use of Questions and Answers in forms.