Exception list

The rows that failed a check, with the check, the value and the owner: an account under two reps, a split summing to 1.4, a claim with no policy, an invoice with no contract price. Produced on every load, worked to a deadline, and never silently adjusted.

DefinitionThe rows that failed a check, with the check, the value and the owner: an account under two reps, a split summing to 1.4, a claim with no policy, an invoice with no contract price. Produced on every load, worked to a deadline, and never silently adjusted.

Lines, not totals

A failed identity is a list of rows. A total that is "off by $41,000" is not actionable; three duplicated lines are.

A deadline makes it real

Unresolved at the deadline: excluded from the run, and the owner told.

How it is used

Every check that fails produces a row: the record, the check, the value found and the owner. The list is worked until empty, and tables that depend on a failed check are held back.

Example

This week: 14 accounts assigned to two reps, 3 invoice lines whose credit splits sum to 1.2, and 41 open deals with a close date in the past.

Where it goes wrong

Failures logged and not owned. The list grows, people stop reading it, and the checks might as well not run.

Articles that use this term

Territory, capacity and quota planning

Five data checks before the commission run, so the payout is right the first time

Five checks a sales operations team runs on the crediting data before commissions are calculated: credited revenue equals the ledger, every split sums to one, every credited line has an assignment in force on its date, overlay credit sits apart from split credit, and every rate and threshold is on the current plan version. Each with the failure it catches, the exception list it produces, and why a payout corrected afterwards costs more than the check.

16 Sept 20262 min read Data quality and reconciliation

Identity and reconciliation: the sum that must hold, and the work of making it hold

The difference between an identity, a sum that must be true by construction, region equals team equals person equals account equals the ledger, and a reconciliation, the work of finding why it is not and fixing the source, why the identity is checked on every upload and the reconciliation is done on the exceptions it lists, the three causes that account for most failures, and why a number is never adjusted to make an identity hold.

16 Sept 20262 min read Territory, capacity and quota planning

Sales crediting rules that reconcile: splits, overlays and the identity that stops double counting

How a sales operations team writes crediting rules so that credited revenue reconciles to the ledger: the difference between attainment credit and revenue, splits that sum to one, overlay credit kept in its own column, the dated assignment that decides who is credited, the identity that every credited dollar is a ledger dollar once, and the exception list that replaces the end-of-quarter dispute.

16 Sept 20262 min read Data quality and reconciliation

Ten questions a head of sales operations asks, and the check that answers each

The ten questions a head of sales operations asks before anything is reported, does the CRM reconcile to the ledger, does every account have one owner, do the territories' quotas sum to the target, are the splits summing to one, is the pipeline clean, has any identifier drifted, which reps' data can be believed, did the definitions change, did the export match its control total, and what is on the exception list, each with the check that answers it, the identity behind it, and why sales operations owns the checks that everyone else's numbers rest on.

16 Sept 20263 min read How-to guides

The monthly refresh in twenty minutes: a checklist for the person who drops the files

A practical checklist for the analyst or operations person who refreshes a coverage report each month from exports: what to export, in what order, the control totals to note before uploading, the validation lines to read after, the three failures that stop the refresh and what to do about each, and what to send the team when it is done.

16 Sept 20263 min read Territory, capacity and quota planning

Crediting on ten invoice lines: the whole arithmetic on one page

The complete sales crediting calculation on ten invoice lines, small enough to check by hand: the dated assignment in force on each invoice date, the two lines with splits, the overlay specialist's credit in its own column, credited revenue per rep, the line whose splits sum to 1.4 and the line with no assignment on its date, the exception list, and the identity that split credit sums to the ledger while overlay credit is reported beside it, so a reader can reproduce every figure and then run it on their own exports.

17 Sept 20263 min read