The numbers, they don't add up
As part of a monthly report IT puts together a report detailing how many requests we had open at the beginning of the month, how many were opened during the course of the month and how many were closed. This has all run smoothly until the guy who normally makes reports out of the graphs was off and the cover guy decided to automate a lot of the number crunching in Excel.
That's when we found that the figures don't add up.
A report run at the beginning of September(midnight on the 1st) which does a count of ALL requests on the system with status "open", "onhold" or "none" stated that we had 144 outstanding requests.
At the beginning of October we do a count of all requests with a Created Date between 1/9/08 and 30/9/08, which tells us we generated 1101 new requests that month, and another report which looks at the same range but Complete Date, tells us we closed 961 requests. According to our final report we have 218 outstanding requests.
And this doesn't make sense. If we had 144 requests at the beginning of September, opened 1101 new ones and closed 961, we should have 284 outstanding requests. So calculating backwards we should have started September with 78 requests, but according to the reports we started with 144.
Something, somewhere is wrong, but I don't know what, and I don't know a way to re-run a check of all requests created during August to double-check the numbers (no SQL query skills).
Any ideas on why the figures are so far out of line?
That's when we found that the figures don't add up.
A report run at the beginning of September(midnight on the 1st) which does a count of ALL requests on the system with status "open", "onhold" or "none" stated that we had 144 outstanding requests.
At the beginning of October we do a count of all requests with a Created Date between 1/9/08 and 30/9/08, which tells us we generated 1101 new requests that month, and another report which looks at the same range but Complete Date, tells us we closed 961 requests. According to our final report we have 218 outstanding requests.
And this doesn't make sense. If we had 144 requests at the beginning of September, opened 1101 new ones and closed 961, we should have 284 outstanding requests. So calculating backwards we should have started September with 78 requests, but according to the reports we started with 144.
Something, somewhere is wrong, but I don't know what, and I don't know a way to re-run a check of all requests created during August to double-check the numbers (no SQL query skills).
Any ideas on why the figures are so far out of line?