YTD in TM1 Time Dimension

[cardantim]

Hello,

I have a time dimension with the following structure; Year - Qtr - Months. The other years have the same level of detail as does 2011. I'd like to now have YTD rollup's. Is it best practice to have the YTD's within each year? And would the "YTD's" be at the same level as the Qtr's?

2010
2011
Q1
Jan
Feb
Mar
Q2
Apr
May
Jun
Q3
Jul
Aug
Sep
Q4
Oct
Nov
Dec

Proposed change;
2011
+Q1
+Q2
+Q3
+Q4
YTD Jan
Jan
YTD Feb
Jan
Feb
YTD Mar
Jan
Feb
Mar
+YTD Apr
+YTD May
+YTD Jun
+YTD Jul
+YTD Aug
+YTD Sep
+YTD Oct
+YTD Nov
+YTD Dec

Thanks,
Tony

[BigG]

If you are using Report Studio C8 then I prefer the levels to be balanced, therefore your leaf node members will only be at the lowest level. In TM1 level 0 is always leaf node, while in C8 level 0 is your top node and you count down from there

[Kaveenga]

Cardantim,

In TM1 all dimension members need to be unique. Therefore in order to have year specific YTD roll ups you need to have year specific months & quarters.

E.g.
2011
----2011-Q1
--------2011-Jan
--------2011-Feb
--------2011-Mar

2012
----2012-Q1
--------2012-Jan
--------2012-Feb
--------2012-Mar

Your users might (mine do) find it easier to see the months once they expand the YTD roll up, instead of a long chain of YTDs rolloing up.

2012-Mar-YTD
----2012-Jan
----2012-Feb
----2012-Mar

2012-Mar-YTD
----2012-Mar
--------2012-Feb-YTD
------------2012-Feb
----------------2012-Jan-YTD
--------------------2012-Jan

YTD roll ups do not have to be at the same level as Qtr roll ups. However, once again this depends on your reporting requirements and reporting tools.

[lotsaram]

To lend some weight to the above although it might be "easier" to build YTD rollups by adding each prior YTD plus the current period as children this is bad practice as it results in hierarchies that are non-intuitive for end users to navigate and for weekly or daily time dimensions it results in an extremely deep structure in terms of the number of levels. Also most other reporting tools require balanced hierarchies which IMO makes goods sense to adopt for time dimensions as it is certainly one (or more) dimension(s) where the level (at least within a hierarchy) can and should have a relative meaning.