This article is about choosing the mechanics of scorecard scoring, including the scoring scale and how to treat missing data. For information about choosing which scoring types will appear as options for your KPIs, see the Editing Scoring Types article. For information about actually using these KPI scoring types, see the Using KPI Scoring Types article.

Scoring Scale

There are several configuration options that allow you to fully customize the scores that are assigned to scorecard items.

1. By default, scores are shown as numbers, but you can change them to be percentages. This is what that looks like in the software.
   
2. By default, scores are 0 to 10, but you can change these to any minimum and maximum value. For example, this is what 0 to 5 scoring looks like.
   
3. You can choose to allow your scores to go outside of the scoring range. When a KPI value is significantly above or below the goal, it can get a score outside of the normal range. In this example a value of 60% would be a perfect score of 10, but because its value is 60.5%, its score is 10.8.

Missing Data

There are several scoring configuration options that deal with how to treat missing data in various forms.

1. "Show N/A Option" is on by default, and allows choosing a value of N/A for KPIs instead of actually entering a number. This means Not Applicable and is like entering a blank value.
   
2. By default, missing KPI values in equations are treated as blank, but they can be treated as 0, N/A, or they can immediately make the entire equation blank.
   
3. Dividing by 0 in an equation usually makes the result blank, but you can optionally make it evaluate to 0.
4. “Ignore Gray Scorecard Items For Tree Rollup” is for missing values when rolling scores up a scorecard tree. By default, missing values are ignored, which means that a parent will have a score if at least one of its children has a score.
   
   When “Ignore Gray Scorecard Items For Tree Rollup” is off, a single missing KPI value will cause everything in the tree above it to have no score.
   
5. “Ignore Periods Without Values For Time Aggregation” is for missing values over time. By default missing values are ignored, so a larger period is scored even when not all of the smaller periods are complete. In this example the Total Gross Profit KPI does not yet have a value for December 2021.
   
   When you change the calendar to Quarter 4, 2021, the Total Gross Profit KPI has a score for that quarter, even though one of the months in the quarter doesn’t have a value.
   
   When “Ignore Periods Without Values For Time Aggregation” is off, Quarter 4, 2021 now has a blank score because not all of the months in the quarter have values.
   

Other Scoring Configuration

1. This sets the scoring type for all non-KPI scorecard items. You can choose from the enabled scoring types in Administration > Scoring Types.
2. Although it’s not a popular configuration option, you can set “Scores Visible” to “no” in Application Administration. This will prevent scores from appearing in most places.
   
   There are still a few places where scoring cannot be avoided, though, like graphing the performance of a non-KPI scorecard item.
3. Forward Effect Scoring is off by default and should not be used by most customers. Most people who enable this decide to disable it later. Forward effect scoring is best explained with an example. By default, a yearly KPI viewed in monthly mode is gray until the very end of the year when it's updated with that year's value. When forward effect scoring is enabled, the KPI would use the previous year's color and score when viewed monthly so it isn't gray. In practice this is very confusing to most users, and is only supported for legacy customers.