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Data Center — FAQs and troubleshooting
Data Center — FAQs and troubleshooting

Solutions for common issues with Data Center formulas or Data Sets

Patrick Gruhn avatar
Written by Patrick Gruhn
Updated over a week ago

🎯 For Admins. This feature, formally called Planning metrics, is included in the Pro Plan and up. Reach out to our support team if you'd like to try it out.


I don't see my Data Center formulas in the Schedule. What should I do?

Several aspects influence how a metric is shown in the schedule. You should:

  • make sure that you're using a Formula to display in Schedule
    You can read more about how to view metrics in your Schedule here.

  • check whether your permissions grant you access to the kind of data you use in your metrics.
    You can see more details about permission levels and data access, here.
    If you need to make changes to the permissions and security groups or you encounter something unexpected, please reach out to our support team.

  • make sure that Show this formula as an option to be displayed in Schedule is toggled on.


My metrics are not showing anything for some of the days in my schedule. Why?

This could mean that there is no data to show for those days, which can be the result of empty cells in your Data set input table or a signal that your formula is not giving a mathematically correct result for every day.

You should head over to your overview page ( Reports > Data Center ), select the metric that's problematic, and try to find the missing data in its components.

If you are using a complex setup (extensive formula metrics referenced used in a joint formula metric ), you might want to toggle on the option to Show this formula as an option to be displayed in Schedule for some of them, to have a way to compare and follow how the data is transformed from one formula to another.

Remember that you can always contact our support team for assistance.


The numbers shown on my Schedule don't make sense. What's going on?

Because the Formulas feature can host complicated operations, sometimes your metrics might not behave as expected.

To understand what's going on, it might be useful to compare what you expected to happen versus what is actually happening.

For instance, if you expect a metric to count a shift you just assigned as 1 but instead, the metric shows a bigger numerical difference, which might indicate that the metric is actually taking into account the number of hours in that shift, rather than the shift itself.

There are a few things you could check to find out what the problem is:

  • if this is happening for a Data set, check what kind of input data your metric is set to (per day or per hour)

  • if you use a Schedule data element in a formula, check whether the element is gathering the data you expect. Hover over the element in the list of actual Schedule data elements and see if that matches your expectations.

  • if you use several mathematical operators in your formulas, check whether the priority of operations is correctly set (the operators follow the arithmetic order of operations, so make sure to use the "(" and ")" to mark which operation needs to be calculated first).

You've checked everything and the metric results still don't look right? Reach out to our support team for assistance.


I'm trying to import my data through a CSV file but I get an error. How do I fix it?

When importing data from a file, Planday performs a series of checks to make sure that the information in the file is valid. When one of these checks fails, you will see an error:

  • "The ID in the file is invalid. You can find the correct ID in a newly exported CSV file."
    Every structural level in Planday has a unique ID, that is used throughout the system to reference your Departments, Positions, or Sections. This is very similar to the ID you have to choose for your metrics, the difference being that it is numerical.
    The CSV needs to contain the ID for the Department, Position, or Section so that the system can put your data in the right place. When you export a CSV file from the metric you are working on, the first cell will contain the structural level ID.
    If that gets accidentally deleted or modified, you simply export another CSV file and copy the ID into the one you want to use for importing.

  • "The same date cannot be in more than one column. Please correct this and try again"
    When you created your Data set, your choice in the Schedule settings defined how the input table needs to look like. Regardless of whether you chose to input data for each day or for each hour, you cannot have the same date twice in your CSV file, much like you do not have the same date twice in your Schedule.
    The CSV file should have each column representing a (unique) date, the same way your metric looks on the overview page.

  • "A shift start time cannot be in more than one row. Please correct this and try again" or
    "A shift start time can only be set at the beginning of an hour (e.g. 10:00)"

    In the same way you cannot have the same date twice in your schedule, you cannot have the same hour appear twice in your CSV file.
    Each row of your CSV file would only represent the start of a new hour (e.g 10:00) to limit the number of rows possible to the maximum amount of hours in a day.
    If in doubt, you can set up a template Data set to Input data for each hour and then use it to export a CSV with the correct hour per row formatting.

  • "Cannot import [an_entry_from_your_file] as a number. Please adjust it and try again"
    All the entries in your CSV file (besides the first column and the first row) should be filled in with numerical values. If a cell contains any other type of data, the system cannot change that in the right shape (for instance, number of shifts needed).
    At the same time, please keep in mind, that decimal points might interfere with the formatting of your numerical values, depending on the tool you use to edit/input data in the CSV file.

  • "Cannot import {0} as a date. Please adjust it and try again" or "Cannot import {0} as a shift start time. Please adjust it and try again,"
    Date and hour formatting has many variations. Usually, this depends on where your organisation is operating (country) and your settings in Planday (Settings > Your organisation > General). If you see either of the two errors above when trying to import a CSV file, you should check your hour and date entries to ensure they are consistent and do not contain any unusual characters. The easiest way to fix it would be to export an example CSV file and match the date/hour formatting.



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