Importing a tracker workbook

If your team can't use a vendor yet, keep your AI ROI record in Roiva's tracker template. It's an Excel workbook laid out the way Roiva holds the record. When you start using Roiva, an Owner or Admin imports it in one step, and the history comes with it.

Getting the template

Download the tracker template. It needs no account. The Read me sheet lists the rules a tracker should keep (see Building an AI ROI tracker yourself), and the Definitions sheet explains every column.

What each sheet holds

Initiatives: one row per initiative, with the same columns as the register template (see Creating initiatives from documents). The other sheets name an initiative by its title here.
Costs: one row per cost per month, approved or not.
Metrics: each metric an initiative is measured by, with its baseline, the months the baseline covers and how it was measured.
Readings: each metric's figure for each month.
Assumptions: the rates and figures your formulas use. Add a row when one changes, with the day it changes; the rows are its history.
Formulas: each formula's name, version and arithmetic. A changed formula is a new version, not an edit.
Value entries: one row per initiative per month of value, with its type, who prepared it, its status, and who approved it and when. The type is a kind of cash (revenue gain, cost savings or cost avoidance) or freed capacity: hours saved at a labor rate, which aren't money the business stopped spending. Capacity that became cash is recorded in Roiva once you're there, where it needs a document that shows it.
Value inputs: each input a value figure was worked out from, by the entry's ID.
Month close: each time a month was closed or reopened, by whom, and why it was reopened.
Time studies: each task you timed with the AI and without it: the initiative, the metric it measures (counted in minutes), the task, what it timed, and its first and last days. See Running a time study.
Timings: one row per task timed: the study, who timed it (a member's email or full name, or a label such as Agent A for anyone else), with the AI or without it, the hands-on minutes and the day.
Summary: for each initiative, approved cash value, all cost, cash minus cost and cash ROI, with freed capacity beside them and never added. It leaves out a value entry its preparer approved, as Roiva would.
Checks: a count of the rows that break a rule, such as an entry approved by the person who prepared it, or a month reopened with no reason. Excel can show a broken rule but can't stop one, so keep every count at zero.

Importing it

An Owner or Admin opens Initiatives → New Initiative → Import a tracker workbook and uploads the workbook.

Roiva reads it and shows what it would create, the people it names and how each matched a member, and every problem by sheet and row. Nothing is created yet, and the workbook file isn't kept.
If anything needs fixing, fix it in the workbook and upload it again.
Choose Import Everything. Roiva creates all of it or, if any record can't be saved, none of it.

People are matched to members by email or by full name. Someone who isn't a member is kept as the workbook names them, and isn't invited.

What comes in

Initiatives, at the stage the sheet gives. An initiative already in Roiva with the same title is used as it is: the other sheets' rows are added to it, and its own fields aren't changed.
Costs, dated in their month.
Baselines and readings. Each baseline keeps how it was measured, and one marked Estimate stays labeled as an estimate.
Assumptions, one version per row, each from its own date.
Value entries, each with its month, status, the inputs from the Value inputs sheet, and the formula's name, version and arithmetic. An evidence link becomes a document the entry cites.
Approvals. An entry the workbook shows approved keeps its approver and approval date. If the approver isn't a member, the entry names them as the workbook does. Roiva's approvals history records the approval as brought in by import, by the person who imported it, because the approval was given outside Roiva.
Time studies, owned by whoever imports them, with their timings. A study whose last day has passed comes in closed, ready to publish in Roiva. The workbook named each timing's arm, so Roiva marks them imported, and a published without-AI figure is a sample, never measured before go-live. An email that isn't a member's is refused: use a label for anyone outside the account.
Closed months. A month whose last event is Closed comes in locked, with who closed it and when, so its costs and approved value can't change until someone reopens it with a reason.

Every imported record says it came from the workbook, with the sheet and row. On a value entry's page, Imported names the file and the row, and an approval made in the workbook says so. ROI → Provisional counts the approved entries in the reporting period that were approved in a workbook.

Checked against Roiva's arithmetic

On the Formulas sheet, Roiva formula can name the Roiva formula a formula of yours matches, as the formula library lists it. For each value entry worked out with that formula, the review works the figure out again with Roiva's formula on the entry's own inputs from the Value inputs sheet, for the entry's month, and says whether the two agree to within a dollar or half a percent. Name each input as the formula library does, by the formula's input names.

A difference usually means your formula isn't quite the one it names, a unit differs (minutes against hours, a year's figure against a month's), or an input is missing. The review also says when the workbook books a figure as cash that Roiva's formula books as freed capacity, or the other way around. The check changes nothing: an imported figure is the workbook's either way.

Applied at the door

An entry the workbook shows approved by the person who prepared it comes in awaiting approval from someone else. So does one marked Approved with no approver or no date.
An approved entry can't come in to a month already locked in Roiva. Reopen the month first, or import the entry awaiting approval.
Over the account's senior approval threshold only the Owner approves, so an approval the workbook records over it comes in as one only when the Owner imports it. On an Admin's import, an entry over the threshold comes in awaiting approval from the Owner or the Owner's delegate. An initiative past Reviewing whose planned cost is over it can't come in on an Admin's import: ask the Owner to import the workbook, or set its stage to Reviewing. When the Owner uploads a workbook with such approvals, the Owner confirms the import too.
Nor can a cost, since nothing new books into a locked month. Reopen the month first.
A month already locked, in review or reopened in Roiva is left as it is, with its close and its journal entries.
Where journal posting is set up, a month holding bills an allocation rule booked from QuickBooks, Xero or NetSuite is left open. Prepare and lock it on its own page, which posts their journal entries. See Allocation rules and accounting periods.
The import checks each month again when you confirm it. One locked, in review or reopened since you uploaded the workbook, or that an allocation rule has booked such bills into since, is left as it is, and the finished import names it. If the workbook also adds a cost, or an approved entry, to a month locked since, nothing is imported and the import says why.

What doesn't come in

Your Excel formulas. Roiva doesn't run them. Each imported figure stays the figure the workbook had, and the formula's arithmetic is kept beside it as text. Roiva calculates an initiative's value only once it uses one of Roiva's own formulas.
The Summary and Checks sheets. Roiva works out its own totals from what was imported.
Initiative-specific assumptions. An assumption comes in as the account's figure.

Building an AI ROI tracker yourself — where to start, and the rules a tracker should keep
Approving value and initiatives — what approval means in Roiva
Allocation rules and accounting periods — closing and reopening a month