Accounting data change thresholds and quarantined files

What this feature does

It is possible for a Property Manager to make an accidental change to their Accounting System, resulting in large numbers of tenants, contractors, properties etc. being deleted from Dwellant. 

Dwellant has inbuilt controls that now stop excessive changes and allow a dedicated team to review.

The Accounting Data Change Thresholds feature protects your system from accidental large-scale changes (like mass tenant deletions or property removals) that could damage your data.
It does this by checking incoming data from your Accounting System against configurable percentage thresholds for additions, modifications, and deletions.

If a change exceeds the set threshold, the data file is automatically quarantined instead of being applied to your database.

The process has two parts:- CHANGE THRESHOLDS and QUARANTINED FILES.

The default (back up) is ADMINISTRATOR GROUP but you should ideally create a ACCOUNTING DATA group. Then only users in this group will be notified.

CHANGE THRESHOLD

• Default thresholds: The system has built-in defaults for each type of data (tenants, contractors, properties, etc.) but you can override these and choose your own as below.
• Types of thresholds:
  • Additions % – how much new data can be added at once
  • Modifications % – how much existing data can change at once

  • Deletions % – how much data can be removed at once

    Tip: If you set a threshold too high, damaging changes might slip through. Too low, and you’ll have to review more files than necessary. Aim for a balance.

You will be able to set a threshold for each entity type.
 

Simply click the line you want to edit to open the below screen.

A blank entry in a threshold column means that there is no threshold.

When You Get Alerts

• Thresholds are checked when the background job (ReadDataJob) runs.
• If the changes exceed thresholds:
  • An Accounting data alarm request is created.
  • The request is assigned to your Accounting Data group, or to Administrators if no group exists. You will be emailed if you're in these groups and have emails configured.
  • The related data files are placed in Quarantine. These are accessible in the Setup menu. 

MANAGING QUARANTINED FILES

When a threshold is breached any user in the ACCOUNTING DATA group will receive an email.

This will provide a request to notify you a change is pending review.

Steps to check and correct:-

1. Go to the Quarantined Files page. This is found under Setup > Accounting.
2. Click on a row to download the spreadsheet showing:
   • Additions
   • Modifications
   • Deletions
3. Review the changes:
   • Column names starting with External and ending with Id show unique identifiers provided by your Accounting System.
4. Decide how to act:
   • ✅ If the changes are correct, tick the row and click OK for Dwellant to process.
     • The red ❌ changes to a green ✅ after refresh.
     • At the next background job run, the file will be processed.
   • ❌ If the changes were accidental, correct the issue in your Accounting System.
     • When the system detects the correction (for example, tenants being restored after deletion), the alarm is cleared and the quarantined file is automatically removed.

Above steps in more details:-

The Quarantined files page looks like as below - 

The reviewer should always review the changes by clicking on a table row. This will download a spreadsheet with one or more tabs as appropriate: Additions, Modifications and Deletions:

Column names starting with External and ending with Id are unique identifiers provided by the Accounting System.

If the reviewer is happy for Dwellant to process the changes, then they tick the row, and click the OK for Dwellant to process button:

Examples

If a reviewer undoes the actions that caused the mass changes, then the Accounting data alarm request is deleted and the data files automatically removed from quarantine. For example:

• Large deletion prevented:
  • On Day 1 if 300 tenants are deleted in error, the file is quarantined before any harm is done. If the tenants are restored later, the system clears the quarantine automatically.
  • On day 2 an Accounting System action results in those 300 tenants being put back. Dwellant determines that no net harm has been done, deletes the request and deletes the file in quarantine, without a user having to do anything to Dwellant.

• Catch rare deletions: Setting a deletion threshold of 0 for “Properties” ensures you are alerted whenever a property is deleted, since these changes are uncommon and potentially disruptive.

   

A little bit of geeky stuff

Calculating Percentages:-

The denominator of a percentage change is the number of entities in a result set before a change is applied.

If the denominator of the percentage is 0, then it is changed to 1 to prevent a divide-by-zero exception.

If the percentage is 0 (it is an integer), but the numerator is greater than 0, then the percentage is rounded up to 1. This allows property managers to use a threshold of 0 to catch any changes. For example, if the deletion threshold is set to 0, then a data file is quarantined if there are any deletions. This is useful for entities such as Properties which are rarely deleted, but which can have odd effects if they are e.g. schedules and tenants for those properties stop getting updated.

Examples:

If the result set starts with 4 entities, and 1 entity is added, then the Percentage Added value is (100 * 1) / 4 = 25%

If the result set is empty, and 5 entities are added, then the Percentage Added value is (100 * 5) / 1 = 500%

If the result set has 500 entities and 1 entity is deleted, then the Percentage Deleted value is (100 * 1) / 500 = 0% which is then rounded to 1%