Locking in Submission Date

I have logic built out where an employee will submit a request to be approved by management. This is not very dynamic, the employee simply enters text in line items and then those line items will adjust to "read only" once manager has selected approve/reject on their end. Is there a way I can add a submitted date line item to display the date when the employee has entered text? I realize the employee can simply select a date, however I want to make sure entries are accurate and employees do no select a date that is not the current date. So I want the date submitted logged behind the scenes.

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Answers

  • This gets a little complicated since there is no "Today's Date" function in Anaplan. You could have an admin update on a daily basis a Systems Module with "Today's Date" in it. Then as a user Submit's a request build in an action into the process that imports today's date from the "Today's Date" line into a "Submission Date" Line item per request. 

     

    Alternatively, you can also update "Today's Date" in the Systems module via Anaplan connect or any other integration tool so that there is no daily task of manually updating this.

  • The best way to hold a system time date is to have a time system module with time as a dimension and boolean lines to flag which dates are in the past and what the present date is. To do so, set the Current Day boolean up to have the current day marked using a formula reference to the dates in the past boolean - something like 'PREVIOUS(Day in Past) AND NOT Day in Past'. Create an action that imports a saved view of that module into itself, mapping the Current Day over to the Day in Past. If you can automate and schedule that process to occur daily you'll have a cross reference to a current date you can use in your process here. 

  • We have exact use case at one of our client 

     

    as @jasonblinn suggested we load today's date into data hub every morning like 7 am by running an anaplan connect script . This date is then sent to spoke models by executing actions, also done through anaplan connect . It serves 2 purposes 

     

    1-> Today's date is loaded in all models which can be referenced accordingly  

    2-> All models are out of hibernation which means when users logs in , models loads quicker  

     

    We then use approve button(not a checkbox)  which runs a process and copies today's  date as approval date . You can use the same thing for submit etc.