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5 reasons to play with your budget using Questica Sandboxes

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Sand play is important to young children to help them develop important skills, such as experimenting, problem solving, sharing and collaborating. Much like the traditional sandbox, application sandboxes can be used by your organization to explore new ways of developing the budget. With a Sandbox created in Questica Budget, you can “play” within a safe environment and test new upgrades, customizations or models without putting your system or data at risk.

 

 1.  Consequence-free environment

A Sandbox is a copy of your existing Questica Budget live environment that has been isolated to enable you to complete tasks without affecting the system or your budget data. In other words, it’s a consequence-free opportunity to play around with Questica Budget without endangering the live environment. Experimenting with Sandboxes can help you try new methods, identify and fix problem areas, make better decisions about budget development, and overall improve your budgeting process.

 

2.  Easy to create, copy and delete Sandboxes

When the Sandbox is created, it captures the live environment in Questica Budget and copies over the functionality and data from that time. The Sandbox administration page is easily accessed from the Questica Budget interface. Once you log in to the system and navigate to the administration page, a list of existing Sandboxes will become available. Users have the option to create, delete or refresh the Sandbox if they want to obtain the latest data from Questica Budget.

 

3.  Use Sandboxes for different purposes

Sandboxes have numerous applications, including trying out new versions of Questica Budget before a software upgrade, training new users, testing large-scale changes, or verifying reports or customizations. In addition, customers can create what-if scenarios with large amounts of data without having to go through the set-up and clean-up process in Questica Budget.

 

4.  What happens in the Sandbox, stays in the Sandbox

Sandboxes are perfectly secure using the same security protocols as Questica Budget. However, there’s enough flexibility for you to provide access to other users who want to “play” in the Sandbox. Rest assured, the Sandbox is structured so that what you do can’t overwrite the data in the live environment of Questica Budget, so there’s no chance of accidentally overwriting or deleting data. Whether testing out a large configuration change or modifying a large batch of budget data, what happens in the Sandbox stays in the Sandbox.

 

5.  Perform the same tasks and functions as in Questica Budget

In the Sandbox, you can use Smart Reports, Dashboards and Print Reports with the same ease as you do in Questica Budget. You can create the Sandbox, perform tasks, run reports and then delete the Sandbox when finished. Sandboxes are user-friendly and provide you with many opportunities to experiment, problem solve, share and collaborate just like a children’s sandbox at the playground. You might even have just as much fun using it.

 

How can your organization get a Questica Sandbox?

 

Questica has a new Sandbox license that is included in new purchases of Questica Budget software. Questica customers are limited to the number indicated on that license. For existing customers upgrading to the new version of Questica Budget 2020.2, they are grandfathered into a license reflecting the number of sites they are already running.

 

Sandboxes are only available to customers hosted on Questica’s AQB (Azure Questica Budget) cloud environment. Any Questica customer hosted on AQB can start using Sandboxes as soon as an upgrade to Questica Budget 2020.2 is complete. Only administrative users of the system will have access to Sandboxes.

 

For more information about Sandboxes or upgrading to Questica Budget 2020.2, please contact Questica’s Customer Success Team at [email protected] or 1.877.707.7755.

To learn more about the Questica Budget Suite of software solutions for budgeting and transparency, read one of our blogs or white papers, take a product tour or sign-up for one of our free monthly informational webinars.

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