Budgeting Vs Reporting

[deepu_sree]

Hi,
We need to do two functionalities:

For Actuals, the data is reported at the most granular level by cost/profit.
----Cost X
--------Leaf Cost X1
--------Leaf Cost X2
etc.

But for budgeting, this has to be done at the highest level - at Cost X.

How do we do this? When we upload manually created budget data in spread sheets, we need to update values in the Consolidated cells - in this example, Cost X.

Please put in your suggestions...

Thanks,
Deepu.

[Martin Ingram]

You can't add data to consolidated cells in TM1 I'm afraid;

You will either need to nominate an existing child of Cost X for budget entry - eg Cost X1.
Or, create a child of Cost X (and Cost Y, Z etc), purely for budget entry purposes - eg Cost XB.

Hope that helps

M

[Martin Ingram]

Another idea would be to create a budget cube that has an aggregated version of your Cost dimension - eg where Cost X is an 'n' level element.

Whether that's a more workable solution than my other suggestion will largely depend on your existing model / needs

[deepu_sree]

Thanks Martin for your suggestions..but the thing is that my actuals cube has more dimensions than the budget cube. Thus I can't even aggregate these two cubes to see the budget Vs Actual in one single cube...is that a right statement? (since I'm new to TM1)

[Martin Ingram]

Yes - that makes sense, and in my experience is always a key design consideration - ie at what level of detail do you want to budget at?

Option 1 - a simple approach is to include a 'Version' (or similar) dimension in what you currently call your 'actuals' cube, to differentiate between 'actual', 'budget', 'forecast', etc etc etc.
Then, when you enter budget data, for those dimensions that you don't really need to categorise budgets, you just load all of the budget data to a single code.

Option 2 - alternatively, you could have Actual and Budget cubes with different levels of dimensionality - you will need to bring data across from one cube to the other (or from both to a third cube) for variance analysis;
If you pass data from the Budget Cube to the Actual cube, you will need to specify an element in each dimension to store the data in any case.
If you pass data from the Actuals cube to the budget cube, you can accomodate an aggregated 'Cost' dimension in the Budget cube, and still bring the aggregated costs across from the Actuals cube via a rule (you can easily create rules bringing data from cubes where the dimensions are specified at greater levels of detail).

There is no easy answer to which is the best approach - my personal preference is for Option 1, but others will argue that is is better to have more cubes for more specific purposes