Intro To Integrity Checks

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All right.

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People are coming in.

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Welcome, everybody.

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Thanks for joining us today for our webinar on system integrity.

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I can still see that people are joining as we speak.

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So I'll go ahead and introduce myself.

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My name is Peter Tomkinson.

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You might have seen me around for a few different hats at the company here.

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I even used to work under Charlene in professional services implementing the software.

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Today, I am the manager of sales here at Windward, and I'm happy and excited to join and introduce Charlene for today's webinar.

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Charlene is our director of professional services, and she's going to take us through system integrity today.

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Of course, as always, these webinars are just the tip of the iceberg.

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This will be followed up with a workshop in two weeks on system integrity.

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And of course, there's always opportunities to work with our professional services and do a deeper dive into this topic or others.

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If you have any questions about that, make sure you reach out to your account manager or myself, and we'd be happy to make sure you get signed up for that workshop and any other PS services that you might need.

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So with that, I will hand it over to Charlene and she can speak a little bit more about system integrity.

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Thank you Charlene.

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Thank you so much Peter. Could you just keep me on task for time?

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All my screens are covered with the content so I don't have a clock in front of me and I just don't want to go long.

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Be respectful of people's time.

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So as Peter said, welcome everyone. Thanks for joining us today.

1:42

My name is Charlene, and I work with our professional services team helping customers get the most out of system five in their day to day operations.

1:50

System integrity is pretty dear to me I've been working with customers around their integrity for a number of years.

1:56

But just before we get into that if you have attended any of our 2026 webinars, you'll have heard me talk about our strategy with this virtual series that we're doing this year.

2:05

And it's really to bring system-wide best practices to you in key areas of the software so you can confidently trust your data.

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It's about that.

2:16

So just briefly to take a little step back in February, we started this whole idea of this virtual series and it really was to lay the foundation for customer fulfillment.

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That's a critical and highly valued workflow, getting your product or services to your customer in a timely and profitable manner.

2:32

And that really kicked off our workshop series.

2:35

Then we moved into, as we started to peel back the onion of that, what are those critical processes around that customer fulfillment piece, such a big part of our business?

2:45

That's really looking at accurate costing.

2:47

There's areas where it cannot be accurate, there's reasons for it.

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We talked about that.

2:52

Then we moved over into barcoding, because that's really an area where it helps with accuracy and efficiencies in multiple areas of your business.

3:00

If you're not barcoding, that's what that workshop was about, was how you could bring that into your business.

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Last month, we talked about stock accuracy, manual adjustments, mistakes that can be made, damaged goods, like those types of things.

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And the reason I'm sharing this with you is because it really comes down to what we're trying to do is to bring good system data integrity to you.

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And there are areas in the software where just with little tweaks to your processes, you can really tighten that up.

3:29

So this month is system integrity.

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It's a critical piece of the system data health, and it's really preparing us for that really big task of counting your inventory, which is our topic for July.

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So I wanted to get some background into what we're trying to do here, and that's gonna take us into system integrity.

3:50

So this afternoon, we're gonna go on a journey of understanding, understanding the what, the why, and the what next, if you aren't familiar with integrity in system five.

4:01

If you are, and you've used it, then hopefully you can pick up something additional, a bit of additional knowledge on the subject.

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In the years that I've been talking to customers about integrity, some are dialed right into it, and they treat it as a tool that helps guide them at the end of the month, leading them into the stack of reporting that they want to be able to pull.

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Others haven't even heard of it, and that's okay because this can easily happen.

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For one, the integrity area in the system is protected behind user security.

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If you don't have the security to access it, you're not going to see it at all.

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It can also happen with roles in the business that are shared, and maybe not specific accountability for certain tasks.

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You've heard the term, oh, that person wears many hats in the business, it's so common.

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And with setups like that, the process can be overlooked for periods of time, or it can just be missed completely.

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So these are not bad things, but what we want to be able to do today is bring awareness to this area of the software and what it can do for your data set.

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So the routines, they actually do change data.

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And that's going to go through, we're going to go in depth through that in the workshop, but they are typically reserved for administrative type roles.

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Sometimes in businesses, people hold multiple roles, but somebody should own it.

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And the reason it's in that administrative type role is really because there's decisions that need to be made when an integrity error happens.

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And you need to have good knowledge of the business and how it operates to be able to make an educated decision.

5:43

All right. All right. All systems are going to have errors. There's nothing that's error-free.

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But that's not really the problem.

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The problem is when the errors, when they aren't found out until it's a bigger problem.

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So system five has been built to keep your business moving, even if something goes wrong.

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And we're gonna get into what goes wrong, but if an error happens during a transaction, the system is gonna log it, but it's still gonna let the sale go through.

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So your customer can walk out the door happy.

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The error is quietly waiting in the background though.

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And in some cases, the error, which we'll talk about on the next slide, happens in the database and you don't actually see an error pop up.

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Now that error can be corrected later, but only if somebody is paying attention, only if they're going in and they're checking the things that I'm gonna recommend.

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So if your team isn't reviewing the errors, those small integrity issues, they don't go away and then they can compound and they can get into a larger project that would need to be unraveled.

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So the question I want you to consider is, does your team right now have a process today for reviewing what system five is flagging?

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And what I mean by that is, are you running the integrity reports?

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Just something to think about.

7:07

OK, so before we get into what can go wrong, I want to make sure we're all talking the same language when it comes to integrity.

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It doesn't mean that system five is honest.

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It means really that every table in your database is balanced and consistent with every other table.

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So if we think about how it works, when someone enters a transaction, let's go back to that sale.

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System 5 just doesn't write to one place.

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It's gonna write to multiple tables in the database, in the background.

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It's going to post invoice lines, customer balance, the GL postings, inventory, and they're all in separate tables.

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It's kind of like what is the quote on the slide.

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it's like updating three spreadsheets at once.

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With one action, it's going out and it's touching multiple things.

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Some tables, just to go a little bit further on the table idea, some tables are only read.

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Oops, I went back, didn't I?

8:06

Yeah, sorry about that.

8:09

Yes, okay.

8:11

When we talk about the tables, in the example of the invoice, the invoice is gonna write to those tables.

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the information. So it's going to make an entry into those tables.

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But there are other tables that don't get written to at all.

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They just get looked at, let's say a price table, because it needs to understand what price to charge this customer. Let's say you've got special pricing.

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But aside from that, the key takeaway here is that integrity is not a reporting problem.

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It's not something that you just go and fix.

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What we want to be able to do is, because it's a data inconsistency, we want to be able to build a process so that you're proactively looking for these things.

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We'll talk about, well, does it make sense if I'm just getting errors and then every month I have to fix them?

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When we go into the workshop, we're gonna talk about the process and how you can look for trends and understand where it's coming from.

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And with that, that's where we're talking about the why.

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So why, why does integrity break?

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So when customers come to us with an integrity issue, and let's say I'm working with them, the first question they'll often ask is, what did I do wrong?

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Like what happened?

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And the honest answer is usually it wasn't anything that the person did wrong.

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The problems aren't caused by bad software or careless people.

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It's just a byproduct, honestly, of how software, hardware, infrastructure, and people interact in the real world today.

9:48

So there are four use cases that we'll talk about that we've come to know can cause problems.

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And what you'll find when we go into the workshop is that the air has come up, but it doesn't say the air happened because you had a power surge or the error happened because you had a wireless connection.

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It doesn't work that way.

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These are just things that give us the knowledge to understand where they can come from.

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And honestly, you know, some people could have been using the system for years and there's nothing in their integrity at all.

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But if we do have integrity issues, it's good to understand where they can come from because it can be frustrating to have errors and not know where they're coming from.

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Power network, an interruption, a crash, a little hiccup at exactly the wrong moment.

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That can cause the record to only write to one table and not the other.

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Doesn't even have to be a major outage.

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Just a small split-second disruption could cause that.

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Can you actually see that happen?

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I've never seen it happen.

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But we can point to those blips in the activity that's going on, pushing information to the database that could cause it.

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Wireless connections, that's the one that catches people off-guard.

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Using a wireless connection in System 5 does carry a risk of data integrity issues.

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The example I'll provide is remote desktop.

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Remote desktop doesn't carry the same risk because the data actually stays on the server that the user is connecting to.

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It's not moving data back and forth that can cause the problem with the wireless connection.

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So it is something that if you do have system five over Wi-Fi, it's really not the best setup.

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And if you do, it's something worth looking into to see if you can get that hardwired in.

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Now, user behavior is a tough one because, you know, you could argue that the system lets you do it.

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So why should it cause a problem?

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but there are some pretty creative things that people can do because you have a lot of people using system five, closing screens in properly or interrupting transactions midway or just shutting the computer down, re-entering something.

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These are everyday things that are examples of in a busy store can leave the system in an inconsistent state.

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And again, it's difficult to be able to them back to that's what exactly is the problem but that's where we're going to talk about repeated errors and running the system the integrity periodically that allow you to kind of sleuth it out you sort of figure out that oh perhaps there's one particular clerk that is doing that is showing up in integrity so we're going to take a deeper look into how that clerk is actually using the And then incomplete saves. There are just simply typing something into a field and then not tabbing out or it gets closed.

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The data perhaps won't commit. So it looks like it's entered, but it wasn't saved.

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And the result is, is that it won't show and it can cause a warning or an error in the integrity.

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But these types of events are just examples.

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The risk isn't about, or what we're not talking about today is fixing all of this.

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These things, they can just happen.

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What we want to be able to build in is that understanding of the system and how to be able to use the integrity as a process to keep your data in a really good state.

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So the key message is that this kind of stuff is normal.

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It's the unmanaged risk.

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We need to be able to manage it.

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About 15 minutes of your webinar.

13:52

Perfect. Thank you, Peter.

13:54

Okay. So this is the scary screen.

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Now, this is where I want to talk about the challenge with integrity problems is that they can go invisible for a long time.

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It's fine to be able to work with a customer and then go four years worth of time and fix all of the errors that are in there but when we're not looking at it all of those years have gone by and financial reports have gone out perhaps to stakeholders to financial organizations and it could be inaccurate you could be misrepresenting the real specific state of the business and so that's where the the scary part is we want to be able to have data that you can rely on, and this is part of that process that we're trying to ensure is happening.

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So the longer the issues go unmanaged, the harder and more expensive they can become to fix because it's time.

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It can take time to be able to fix them.

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When we're doing them periodically and frequently, then that becomes much easier.

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And there can be prevention that's put in there as well.

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Okay, so let's understand what the integrity is and what it does.

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So we have a list of integrity checks, the utilities really, and think of it as your early warning system.

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You can use it to repair things, but it's more of a routine check to make sure things are right.

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And what it does when we run it is it's going to go through these, we're going to detect, it's going to analyze the inconsistencies in past transactions.

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It will identify the specific errors, whether it's a ledger, a book month, tax error, and it's going to alert you.

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So that's the alert where it's going to present you with errors that need to be looked at or addressed.

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And then ultimately, repeat this periodically to prevent these things from happening over and over again.

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So on the left you can see that what the checks actually cover and in the workshop we'll talk about these like unbalanced ledger entries. What is that? Book month mismatches, missing tenders and how do we go about fixing them?

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On the right is really the critical best practice.

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It's, you know, your system needs to be run regularly, not just when something looks off, maybe even not just at month end.

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I'll give you a quick example.

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I was working with a customer going through something like this.

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And what we started doing is I had the customer run the integrity daily, just to build the habit and to get used to looking at what it's returning to us.

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And then once you've got the habit built, then that's where that it can be really satisfying to run the integrity and there's nothing that shows up.

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So the goal is to really catch the errors while they're small and not when you're under pressure wanting to generate reports or do reconciliations.

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And one big thing that I mentioned earlier is that we're gonna move into physical inventory count next month, is that we really wanna be doing these before we're doing anything major, like your bank rec or the physical inventory count or printing those financial reports.

17:15

Okay, so yeah, where does the team, typically where do people get stuck?

17:21

Well, these are just example things that, well, I ran the check, now what?

17:26

That's a big thing because in my experience, people aren't sure what they should do next.

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And that's what we're gonna talk about in the workshop.

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What do I need to do so that I can fix this and it gets off of this report?

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You know, the feeling of not knowing what is safe to fix and what's not safe to fix is really the education part.

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These are transactions and they resulted from somebody entering that transaction in.

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We just need to investigate where it came from and perhaps we need to reference some source data to understand, okay, well, if it's a date mismatch, well, when did it actually happen?

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and that's where the decisions need to come into play.

18:12

In many cases, the system, not in many cases, I'll start over.

18:15

The system is designed to create a transaction, we'll go back to the sale, and it's configured to do what it's supposed to do, to post to all those tables that I talked about, to update the customer record, so when I go into the customer record, I can see the invoice there, I can see the payment details, And when there are some of the errors that I discussed, when they happen, it's often a simple matter of just opening that transaction up, saving it, and then it just picks up that configuration and it posts as it should have.

18:48

The first time something happened, but this time it's just resaving and then everything's golden.

18:56

Okay, so then really the gap between what the tool is and how we use it is gonna be closed in the workshop.

19:05

I know what the tool is but now we're going to learn how to use it.

19:13

Okay so the workshop is going to today this is designed to build awareness um hopefully you understand a bit more of what integrity is why it breaks and what the tool is which i'm going to jump over into the product just to show you that tool um and why that matters but that doesn't give you the process and that's what you'd be getting out of the process after the workshop um you can understand what the typical integrity errors mean, know what and how to fix it, build a repeatable monthly integrity process, and trust your financials.

19:47

That's the outcome. What we're going to be going over in the workshop is stock integrity.

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So I talked about posting to I kept using the sale example, but there's a stock integrity as well.

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And what that's doing is looking for same similar discrepancies with your stock.

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So, I've got 17 in stock, is that accurate?

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And we're gonna go through what that stock integrity looks like, it's a newer in the last year or so, maybe two.

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Test proof, we'll look at integrity errors and then talk about the benefits and the importance of that minimum book month.

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Just under 10 minutes left, Charlene.

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Awesome, thank you.

20:30

Okay, so really we're talking about finance and accounting teams, operations and inventory managers.

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If you're responsible for month end accuracy or system oversight, this is really who it's designed for.

20:52

Yeah.

20:53

Okay, before I jump into the product and show you a few things, these are free resources to start.

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But if you wanted to go do some looking, you know, you can that we've got some links there at the bottom, Windward Learning Academy, there's the system five online help, we've got our self help portal, there is our support line complex integrity issues do typically come over into professional support.

21:17

But if you go and leave today and you go run the integrity checks or run the test proof that I'm going to show you in just a moment, and you've got some information in there and you want to figure out how to solve it, check out the free resources, but consider the workshop because we're going to go into detail with that.

21:37

All right, I'm just going to move over to a different monitor and pull system five up.

21:43

There we go, okay.

21:45

You got that system five, Peter?

21:52

Okay, I'm going to assume yes.

21:54

Yes, sorry, couldn't find anything.

21:56

Awesome, just wanted to make sure it was on screen.

21:59

Okay, so there's a couple of things that are like a key indicator.

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And the first one is super easy to run.

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And if you run your trial balance, now I'll preface this with this is a very limited demo.

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It doesn't have a lot of information in it, but it's this thing down at the bottom and it's called proof.

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And the proof is if there's a value in there, the data set that I'm gonna use for the workshop does have problems in it.

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So we can go through what that looks like.

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This, the proof is at zero, but if there's a value there, well, that's an indicator that your debits and credits don't equal.

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And so you'd want to look further.

22:38

So that's a really quick way to go and check it out.

22:42

That's in the general ledger as our integrity checks.

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So integrity checks, this is what we've got on here.

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And that first one is when we go through the process is really where we start, is that we can do our test proof.

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and this is going to go through and test all the financial periods that exist in the system, which you can choose to put the range in yourself.

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And if you're departmentalized, as this data set is, it will go through each department, identifying where there is a problem, if there is one. And then we have some routines up here.

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So fix-proof, wizard-fix, fix-all, These things do things and it's almost like what I was talking about with resaving the invoice.

23:31

It's going to take the configuration and how the system is built and the logic and it's going to apply that to fix transactions that are fixable.

23:40

That doesn't always do the trick and there's different ways, different things that they fix as opposed to the actual integrity.

23:48

So, integrity is broken into AR, AP, journal, stock integrity, and then we can just do all.

23:57

So these routines, they go through and they will list out, as I suggested, they go back in time and they look at transactions and they will list any problems.

24:08

So a takeaway for you is that if you have never run these, you can try it in your training, but running the integrity doesn't hurt anything.

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All it's doing is displaying problems, if there is any.

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So those are the two tips for today is that you can check in your trial balance under ledger reports, or you can come in test proof.

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And if you'd like, you can go check out one of your integrities here and just run them and see what's happening there.

24:38

Okay.

24:39

So now just a couple more.

24:42

We have five minutes left here, Charlene.

24:44

Perfect, perfect.

24:45

Okay, so here's the information to register for the workshop.

24:49

There is a link there, sales.windwardsoftware.com if you'd like to self-register and make your purchase, or you can talk to your account manager, they'd be happy to help you with this.

24:59

And it is on June 25th, it's at 9 a.m.

25:03

Pacific time, and they usually run hour and a half to two hours, just so that you've got a little bit of background there.

25:11

And then with that, just in the last couple of minutes, we are going to just spotlight something that is fairly new for our company.

25:21

And last week we did launch a Shopify integration.

25:26

And really what this is talking about is if you're selling through storefront online, you know, you want to be able to have that tightened integration so that you're not having to re-enter information from your online store into system five.

25:42

Well, this can help and it's brand new for our team to build an integration.

25:48

What that integration does is orders come in as you can see here.

25:53

Inventory is going to sync back to Shopify so that you've got updated quantities, customers and payments they map back into system five and they're recorded against the customer account.

26:08

And then you can disregard the number four.

26:12

I'm sorry, this was a generated slide that is, yeah, we don't need to worry about failed syncs.

26:23

If you're interested in the Shopify integration, please reach out to your account manager.

26:27

It is brand new.

26:29

We are starting to onboard people and it's pretty exciting.

26:32

If you've got Shopify or are interested in the Shopify platform, then certainly come talk to us.

26:40

Is there anything you'd like to add to that, Peter?

26:43

No, I think that's great.

26:46

I agree that the board doesn't even make sense on its face, but yeah, no, it's a great solution, keeping your inventory aligned both in store and online, and of course capturing those sales that happen online back in your Windward software.

27:01

So yeah, that full circle.

27:04

We do have a few minutes left.

27:05

Typically, we don't really do deep dives into questions or anything, the webinar.

27:10

But there were some very, I would say, specific or quick questions.

27:16

First of all, yes, there is a demo of the Shopify integration.

27:20

We should be able to find it on our website.

27:23

Probably, I wouldn't be surprised if you've seen an email from our marketing team.

27:27

I think it's even on our YouTube channel.

27:30

So absolutely, you should be able to find it.

27:32

search our site or search YouTube, Windward Software, Shopify, you will find it.

27:40

And we can definitely resend out that information specifically to those that have asked.

27:47

Now, a quick question, Charlene, just because especially we encourage some to run maybe some integrity reports, some file checks.

27:57

I just thought these might be good questions to touch on, and this should be pretty quick, not too deep.

28:04

Now, first one is, this is a good question from Jody, can we assume doing an inventory count will correct the inventory, I believe it says integrity there, or inventory values?

28:18

And from my experience, the answer is, well, sure, it will correct the values, but it doesn't necessarily correct the integrity issues.

28:25

And if you were to correct the integrity issues, well, those inventory values might get thrown out again as a result, is that accurate or?

28:33

Yes, and I think in the deep dive in the workshop, the stock integrity is really looking at, there's two things that happen against an inventory record.

28:40

There's the stock value that you have in stock, and then there is the stock history.

28:45

From the beginning of time, it's gonna add and subtract based on what you purchased and sold and adjusted.

28:51

And if those two are out of sync, the physical inventory count will not fix that.

28:55

That's really why we're doing the integrity first and next month doing the physical inventory count?

29:00

Because you wouldn't want to correct any of those issues first before doing the physical inventory count.

29:09

Awesome.

29:11

So yeah, we just have a little less than a minute.

29:13

There was another question about clearing oversolds manually before doing integrity checks.

29:18

I don't think that would necessarily have a really large effect on integrity checks in general.

29:24

Although, again, yeah, I'll let Charlene maybe weigh in a little bit more.

29:30

Yeah, we can, again, go deeper into that in the workshop, but the oversolds, more recently, probably in the past, at least version seven forward, oversolds are being treated differently and they're being separated away from the actual accumulation of stock.

29:53

So, clearing oversolds, certainly doing that before the integrity, it's not a bad practice, but it's not necessarily connected to the integrity issues either.

30:08

I think it's the other kind of almost exclusive in a sense.

30:13

I would agree, but I think clearing of oversolds is something that there are people that will organically where they actually are they're receiving stock or sorry they're selling stock before they actually receive the product in and so they oversell and then it's replenished and cleared based on receiving product on a purchase order but if there is an oversold that's just inaccurate then to me that would you'd want to be looking at those before because they're not going to show up as a problem we allow overselling so as a good practice I would I would want I would you'd clear them before the integrity. Awesome.

30:48

Well thanks Charlene for getting into a couple of those Q &A's today in the webinar. Thank you everyone for joining us today.

30:57

And yeah, for all those other questions and for deeper dives into the ones that we touched on today, make sure to catch that workshop, reach out to your account manager if you have any questions.

31:07

Thank you, everyone.

31:08

Have a wonderful day.

31:09

Thank you.