What’s new in Novi: August 2026
Novi now reaches into your own network without asking you to open it. Plus a faster way to load a spreadsheet, CLARA that proposes before it acts, and a month of smaller things that make a working day smoother.
August was a long month. The headline is a new way to get data out of the systems that actually run your company and into a model, without the conversation with IT that usually kills the project. Below it sit a dozen improvements, from a spreadsheet loader to a rebuilt list grid, that come from watching people use Novi every day.
Novi Gateway: your data, without opening your network
Every planning tool eventually needs the numbers from the ERP. The usual answer is to expose a database, open a VPN, or hand a vendor a route into the network. Security teams say no, and they are right to.
The Novi Gateway removes that request instead of negotiating it. It is a small service installed on a machine inside your network, on a virtual machine your own team provides. It connects outwards to your Novi tenant over an encrypted connection. Nothing connects inwards.
What you allow
Outbound access to your tenant’s address, on the standard web port. That is the whole ask.
What you don’t
No port to open. No database to expose. No inbound firewall rule. No route handed to a vendor.
The Gateway runs the extracts your team has defined, on your network, against a read-only database account your own administrator issues and Novi never sees. What crosses the boundary is the result of that extract: model-ready, shaped the way your finance team wants it. You decide what leaves, before it leaves.
And it arrives whole. The Gateway delivers the transactions themselves, one row for one row, not a summary of them. The lines land in Novi and stay lines, so a number in the model can be opened down to the entries that made it.
The extract runs where the data already is. The boundary is crossed by a result, not by a connection, which is why the question stops being “how much of our network do we open” and becomes “which numbers do we send.” The second question is one finance can answer on its own.
On the Novi side, a Gateway-fed source behaves like any other data source. A modeller picks the Gateway and the output that feeds a table, presses Synchronise, and the table matches what was delivered. The first delivery creates the table. Every delivery lands in the import history.
Every Gateway event, from sign-in to access granted to each synchronisation, is written to the audit trail. Access is granted per workspace and can be withdrawn at any moment, and it stops working the moment it is withdrawn.
The Gateway connects to SQL Server, PostgreSQL and MySQL directly, or takes the output of the data-preparation pipeline you already run. It installs with one command and updates itself from Novi.
The Gateway is in production, against an on-premises ERP whose ledger runs to millions of transaction lines. On the Novi side, a synchronisation of 1.2 million rows completes in 1.9 seconds.
Quick Upload: a spreadsheet straight into a table
Not every load deserves a data source. Sometimes an analyst has a file and wants the numbers in the table now.
Quick Upload takes a CSV, Excel or Parquet file from the table toolbar, shows how its columns line up with the table’s dimensions, and writes the values. The file can be one row per value, periods spread across columns, or the exact shape Novi itself exports. A dimension the file does not carry, such as the version, can be pinned to a fixed member. Files saved by a Polish Excel, with a comma for the decimal point, import as they should.
Nothing is written until you have seen what will happen: how many members matched each dictionary, which values were not recognised, and exactly how many cells will change. Replace or add, clear the target first or not, and by default only the versions the file carries are touched.
CLARA 2.0: proposals, not surprises
CLARA now works inside a context you choose, the models and tables a conversation may see, and stays there. Every change CLARA wants to make arrives as a proposal with a preview. Nothing is applied until you approve it. When CLARA needs a decision, it asks with a question rather than guessing.
What CLARA can do has grown considerably. It can build a P&L that totals, lay out a line-items table, create the link that moves data between tables, change a block of cells with one rule, put a what-if into its own scenario, load actuals and show what landed, run a contribution cycle, separate the currency effect from the real one in a variance, rank the drivers behind a number, and build a dashboard or a story. It can propose a playbook, a reusable procedure, which you approve before it is kept.
And models are hidden from CLARA by default. A modeller decides what it may see.
Links that carry calculated results, keyed by text
A link is how data moves from one table to another in Novi. Two changes make links do much more of the work.
First, a text column in a T-Table or S-Table can now key a link: map it onto a target dictionary by code, by name, by both, or with manual pairs, and use it to filter which rows are read. A list of transactions with a cost-centre code becomes a planning table without an intermediate step.
Second, links carry calculated results, not just stored values. A weighted average or a margin arrives in the next table as the number you see in the source. Links can send an initial load when created, run automatically after an import, and show when the source changed, when the target changed and when the link last ran. Large loads are hundreds of times faster than they were in July.
The rest of the month
REF() reads a value from another table at a coordinate you project. PARENT() climbs the hierarchy. ROUND, ABS, FLOOR, CEILING, FINDFIRST, FINDLAST and a set of text functions for calculated columns. The editor autocompletes all of them.
Column headers with a filter funnel whose values cascade, three-state sort, hide this or hide others, copy and download of distinct values. Create a dictionary from a column in one step. A T-Table can be built on any dictionary type and its columns follow the dictionary as it changes.
A link that builds a dictionary can be bound to a saved view of its source. Multilevel hierarchies come from Level columns. Before a run deletes anything, the plan says what will go and asks. Source links run from an Automation. Picklists can be bound to any subset of any dictionary.
The Time Wizard lets a new dictionary choose its fiscal year, offers half-years, normalises hand-built codes, and explains why a dictionary cannot be extended rather than failing quietly.
Drag the corner to fill a block. Drag to resize columns. Cells shown in thousands or millions are typed in those units. Picklists and dates copy as text and paste back as values. Export the current view, totals and formulas included, or all data, to a CSV that opens correctly in Excel.
The audit trail sits beside the model canvas and says what changed. A model records who created it and who deleted it. Tables and dictionaries show their last update date.
Standard users see a simpler Novi. Building structure is modeller work, and the buttons that would only be refused are gone. A modeller can still let users edit a particular dictionary.
A dictionary with hundreds of thousands of elements opens in seconds.
All of this is live. Open the bell in Novi for the full release notes, in English, Polish, French, German and Spanish.
Read your own systems, without opening them
The Gateway installs on a machine your team owns, runs the extracts your team defines, and sends out only the result. If your ERP sits on your own network and the integration conversation has stalled before, this is the one to bring to your security team.