Introduction

Grunddata is a business support system for reference data, supplementary master data and other business data. It is the place where your organisation keeps the data that other systems depend on but that none of them owns: mapping tables, classifications, hierarchies, reporting parameters, limits, cost centres, report definitions, and all the other lists that are usually scattered across spreadsheets and shared drives.

Grunddata is not a traditional master data management (MDM) tool. It sits next to your MDM and data warehouse, not instead of them.

The problem Grunddata solves

Most organisations have a handful of spreadsheets that quietly run the business. They are maintained by one or two people, they have no validation, no history, and no safe way for a downstream system to read them.

Grunddata keeps the part your business users like — editing data in a spreadsheet — and adds the parts they never had:

• A defined structure with datatypes, required fields, and referential lookups.
• Validation rules that are enforced on every save, no matter which tool you use.
• Full history. Every change is a commit with an author, a timestamp and a message.
• A stable API. Downstream systems, ETL jobs and Power BI read from a governed contract instead of a file share.

How the pieces fit together

Model                 (a folder / grouping, e.g. "Accounting")
 └── Table            (a list, e.g. "Accounts")
      ├── Attribute   (a column, e.g. "account_type")
      ├── Attribute   (a column that points at a Domain table)
      ├── Validation  (rules applied when records are saved)
      ├── View        (a stable, named contract exposed over OData)
      └── Record      (a row, versioned, created by a commit)

Mental model

If you know spreadsheets: a model is the workbook, a table is a sheet, an attribute is a column, and a record is a row. The difference is that Grunddata knows what each column means and refuses to store values that break your rules.

Ways to work with Grunddata

1. The web app — for designing structure (models, tables, attributes, validations, views) and for single-row edits.

2. The Excel plugin — the main tool for business users maintaining records in bulk. See Excel plugin.

3. The Google Sheets add-on — the same workflow for teams working in Google Workspace. See Google Sheets add-on.

4. The API and OData feed — for IT, ETL pipelines, Power Query and Power BI. See OData API.

Note

All four surfaces talk to the same API and are subject to the same validation rules. There is no “back door” that skips your governance.

Where to go next

• New to Grunddata? Start with Getting started.
• Want the vocabulary first? Read Core concepts.
• Migrating from Microsoft MDS? Read Coming from Microsoft MDS.