When I was teaching my first-year accounting students the ins and outs of a cash flow statement I started with the basics and taught them the ability to reason why each line of the cashflow statement should be added or subtracted. If the students had a rocky understanding of debits, credits, the accounting equation, or lacked familiarity with the names of common business accounts, they really struggled.
Don’t worry, this article isn’t about cashflows. It’s an article to inspire you to go back to the basics as you embark on learning more complex features within template studio. Right, wrong, best practice, poor practice, it would be exhausting to memorize if you can’t reason through it. In the case of Prophix, understanding the basics will help you learn our tool faster and help you build your model & reports to follow best practices.
Let’s recap the basics from the Mastering Template Studio Presentation (Insert link to recording here):
To build a report in Prophix, you need to know where your data is stored. To know where your data is stored, you will need to be familiar with your organization’s model and know the basics of OLAP. If you are new to using Prophix, seek out a Prophix expert with familiarity with your model. That could be your implementation consultant, a product adoption consultant (if you have CSP), or an employee at your organization who has been using Prophix for some time. Users with Administrator licenses are typically familiar with their organization’s model. However, your Advanced Users will always appreciate any background about your model they might not have to facilitate their report building. Please don’t forget about them!
Reports display data in your cube. For clients not familiar with OLAP technology, the shift from data being saved to a static excel sheet to a report displaying the data stored in your cube is transformational. It is what allows users to make changes in report (saving the change to the cube) and see them in an instant in another report (refreshed since the most recent data change)!
To help with the maintenance of your template, use Dynamic Selection and Name sets where possible. This Prophix Help Article is a good quick recap. Let us know in the comments if there is a nameset you can’t live without!
With the basics covered, I encourage you to watch Ally Tinebra’s presentation (if you haven’t already) as she goes into greater detail how to design templates within the template studio application itself (Insert link to her recording here).
Happy Report Building!
The recorded session can be viewed on Prophix Academy
Click here
