How to freeze historical reporting structures?

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fleaster
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How to freeze historical reporting structures?

Post by fleaster »

Ok, so the context of this question is for a financial reporting system covering both management and regulatory reporting ...let's just say you have data is stored at the leaf level GL, which may map to multiple reporting lines e.g.

+Repline A1
....GL12345
+ReplineB1
....GL12345
+ReplineC1
....GL12345

...then there is a remapping in a subsequent month from Repline B1 to Repline B3, so the hierarchy then becomes:

+Repline A1
....GL12345
+ReplineB3
....GL12345
+ReplineC1
....GL12345

Question: how to reflect current changes in mapping structures, without impacting historicals?

Some possible solutions I can think of are:

Option A - Split the Account and Reporting Line into 2 x dimensions
PROS: historicals frozen, simple design
CONS: annoying for users having to navigate 2 dimensions

Option B - Create a concatenation between Account and Reporting Line)

e.g. GL12345-ReplineB1, GL12345-ReplineB2 etc

+Repline A1
....GL12345-Repline A1
+ReplineB3
....GL12345-ReplineB3

PROS: historicals frozen, easy to browse
CONS: duplication of leaf data may impact storage/performance

Option C - Create a dummy "Linking" element between Account and Reporting Line

e.g. GL12345-Link1 rolls to Repline A1, B1, C1 etc

+ReplineA1
....Link02
.......GL12345-Link02

+ReplineB3
....Link02
.......GL12345-Link02

PROS: historicals frozen, easy to browse
CONS: additional overhead to maintain separate mapping structures, Link must be unique, Link to Reporting Lines may become complex (e.g. there may be 6+ Reporting Lines to link to)

Option D - Create a cube for frozen data & structures

PROS: historicals frozen
CONS: additional overhead to maintain separate cube, less efficient workflow for users, questions on "which cube has the real source of truth"? etc

Option E - ???

...anyone have any other ideas? Also am curious to know how people have handled this situation if you'd like to share your experiences :)

Many thanks!

Matt
RJ!
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Re: How to freeze historical reporting structures?

Post by RJ! »

Wouldn't be a problem in Business Objects... ;)

For Consistancy wouldn't Option B be the best solution since you already do this for the Account Structre?
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Martin Ryan
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Re: How to freeze historical reporting structures?

Post by Martin Ryan »

RJ! wrote:Wouldn't be a problem in Business Objects... ;)
Outrageous! Blasphemy! TM1 solves all your problems from data consolidation to which is the best coffee brand to how to get a hot date Friday night. I don't know why you'd go anywhere else.

I'd go with option B myself too. It's the least bad option and allows you to (fairly) easily create multiple consolidations to handle going up and down the two different hierarchies (account and reporting line).

Or use another reporting system that's designed for this kind of problem. But you didn't hear it from me.

Martin
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fleaster
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Re: How to freeze historical reporting structures?

Post by fleaster »

hehe thanks Martin... I shall consider using TM1 for relationship planning in future ;)
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