Datasets.
Every business has numbers that never got a system: the budget, the headcount plan, the price list, the occupancy targets. They live in one person's spreadsheet, and every report that needs them gets built by hand.
Data comes in, so it can be reported on, trended and watched.
A spreadsheet becomes a source
Not an attachment and not a one-off import. It sits alongside your ledger as something reports can read, so the budget in your P and L is the budget you actually agreed.
It joins to live data
Your plan against your actuals, in one place, without anyone pasting a column across. That is the whole reason the spreadsheet existed.
You update it when it changes
Replace the file and every report reading it moves together. No hunting for the eleven places the old number was pasted.
EVA can ask you for one
When she is composing a report and hits a figure only you know - occupancy, utilisation, a target - she can put an edit grid in front of you rather than guessing or leaving a hole.
Where this usually comes from.
Any number that matters, has no system behind it, and currently lives in a file named something like final-v3-USE-THIS.xlsx.
Data that changes daily and lives in a real system. A spreadsheet you have to remember to update will go stale, and a stale source is worse than no source.
Six kinds of connection, and they are not interchangeable.
Picking the wrong one is the most common mistake people make in their first fortnight, so here is the whole set in one place.
Purpose-built pipelines into the systems you already run
EVA reaches into another system and does something
Your own SQL, read directly and joined to everything else
Contracts, leases and policies she can read and cite
Public pages worth watching, read on a schedule
Datasets, answered.
What file formats can I upload?
Spreadsheets and CSVs. The practical requirement is that it has a header row and consistent columns, because a file where the shape changes halfway down cannot be read reliably by anything, including a person.
What happens when my budget changes?
Replace the file. Every report and Pulse that reads it picks up the new figures together, which is the difference between one source and a number pasted into eleven places.
Can I compare a spreadsheet budget to live accounting data?
Yes. That is the most common reason people upload one. Once the dataset is connected it sits in the same warehouse as your ledger, so budget against actual is a report rather than an afternoon.
Is an uploaded spreadsheet private to us?
It lives in your own database in your own region, like every other connection, and is never used to train any model. Who can see it inside your organisation is governed by the same user groups and row-level rules as everything else.
Connect one and see.
Bring your messiest system and your simplest one. Fourteen days is enough to find out whether this works on both.