Staying on top of business health is important for anyone who is running or advising a business. Your key metrics' performance tells you what the key challenges and opportunities are present in your business, and most of the time those metrics incorporate non-financial information, or in Cockwork, Custom Variables! Custom Variables are non-financial data that you can use to drive assumptions and Custom Metrics. They can be $ values, percentages, or raw numbers.
We've made it easy for you to both create and update Custom Variables with Clockwork, so you can better understand and manage your business!
Creating Custom Variables:
This is where you will create your Custom Variables to reflect any data pieces that are essential for measuring your health and success. There a couple of ways to create/access your custom variables:
1) From the "Manage Custom Variables" button in the Financial Model:
2) In Settings. First, go to 'Settings', then click on the 'Connected Data' tab, then click the '+ Add Custom Variable' button. Once you do, you'll see a tile fold out with fields to define the name, unit, and behavior of the variable.`
3) While building a Custom Metric. If you are in the middle of building a Custom Metric and realize you've forgotten to create a Custom Variable needed for the formula - fret not! In the Custom Metric builder, you'll want to click the 'Custom Variable' drop-down, then '+ Add Custom Variable'.
4) When importing a spreadsheet template into Clockwork, you can simply upload with labeled rows for new variables and labeled columns for monthly results. Even if your new Custom Variables don’t already exist in Clockwork, they will be created during that import process.
Updating the Data (Custom Variables)
You can update your data (Custom Variables) in your settings --> Connected Data as the bottom of that screen.
You can either type in you updated data, or download our Template to Excel and them import it should you want to update the data in bulk.
When you're using the template to import data, you can also create new variables on your spreadsheet and Clockwork will create them in the platorm.
*NOTE: Now that you've created your Custom Variables, you can easily update them with data to begin getting your tailored insights!
Need additional help? Reach out to our support chat in the bottom right of your screen any time you have questions!