With budget season looming, it’s important to ensure that your budget templates and reports are capturing all your dreams and desires!
Template Calculations
When it comes to creating your budget, it’s important to think about how end users create their budget. What KPIs or calculations come into play? If multiple factors or inputs are utilized, template calculations are extremely useful!
In Design Mode, you can enter the calculation into the cell with the desired member combination, replacing the default “1,235” amount with the formula. For the data to be saved to the cube, the member combination must be at the lowest level. Additionally, refreshing your report will confirm the data is written to the cube, or you are running a “Template Calculation” process in Process Manager.
Some common examples of Template Calculation formulas are taking your Actual data and incorporating multiple factors to create your budget and allocating amounts that are too specific for Infoflexes to be used.
Row Notes
Now that you have that level of detail in your budget creation, what is another way to add additional insight? Row notes, of course!
In Design Mode, you are able to insert Row Notes which allow you to provide commentary to your report, without having to click into a specific cell. The text written into the Row Note when in Data Entry mode is saved to the cube, and can be referenced in other reports utilizing cell reports.
Not only are row notes important for the budget, but can provide extra insight into financial reports! You’ll be able to add commentary on your actual data throughout the year, and give explanations on variances between actual and plan data.
Multiple Data Views
Now that you’ve created your budget, you’ll need reports to showcase your plan. What is better than creating a consolidated report, outlining all key aspects of the company!
Building out a consolidated report may require multiple data views, and sometimes even multiple cubes. In Template Studio, you are able to insert more than one data view to create a report. Data views can also include calculations referencing the other data views in the template. To simplify your report, you will want to consolidate your pages using “Page Hierarchy Groups”. For each common dimension, you are able to group them into one page when running the report. For example, if Time is in the pages for each data view, you can group it into one page. Not only does this clean the presentation, but the member selection of this page group applies to all dimensions.
Reports where multiple data views are typically used incorporate data views from the Financial Cube, Revenue Cube and Personnel Cube into one report!
Happy budgeting !
What are your favorite uses of template calculations, row notes and reports with multiple data views?
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