Creating Financial Data Items

Adding financial data items

You choose Financial Data Item from the Maintain menu to create a new financial data item. This opens the Financial Data Item dialog box. From this starting point you can perform the following functions:

• Name the financial data item.

• Specify the data type for the financial data item. You can choose Integer, Shortinteger Decimal, Shortdecimal, or Text.

• Specify the type of financial data item. You can choose Stored, Formula Manual, or Formula Automatic.

• For a stored or Formula Manual financial data item, specify the order of the dimensions. For more information, see "Specifying Dimension Order for Financial Data Items".

• For a formula data item, enter the formula. For more information, see "Examples: Formula financial data items".

• For a stored financial data item for which data is sparse, you can specify how to handle sparse data. For more information, see "Specifying How Sparse Data is Handled in Financial Data Items".

• Enable or disable numeric scaling.

• Specify the text for row and column labels.

• If you are an administrator, you can also perform the following tasks:
  • Specify if the data associated with the financial data item will be available for distribution to users.

  • Associate a solve definition or group solve definition with the financial data item. For more information, see "Associating solve definitions with financial data items".

Example: Stored financial data item

The following example shows the Maintain Financial Data Item dialog box with information for a stored financial data item, Actuals.

Examples: Formula financial data items

Example 1: Budget variance financial data item

The following example illustrates a formula financial data item that calculates the variance between a financial data item called Budget and a financial data item called Actuals. Both of these financial data items are dimensioned by Time, Line and Organization.

The formula, located in the Formula box, is:

 (act-bud)*line.bw

where:

• act is the object name of the financial data item Actuals.

• bud is the object name of the financial data item Budget.

• line.bw specifies the Line dimension, which includes a B/W Variance Indicator. When you create a dimension that includes support for a B/W Variance Indicator, a .BW object is created in the database.

Using line.bw in the formula allows the signage of the variance to be correctly displayed.

The Budvar financial data item would appear in a report, as shown following. The negative variance that results from using line.bw in the formula is displayed in parentheses.

Example 2: Calculating line item as a percentage of revenue

The following example illustrates a formula financial data item that calculates every Line Item as a percentage of the Revenue Line Item for the financial data item Actuals for every Time and Organization.

The formula, located in the Formula box, is:

act/act(line'A4000')*100

where:

• act is the object name for the financial data item Actuals

• line is the internal identifier representing the Line dimension

• A4000 is the internal identifier representing the Revenue line item

Thus, act (line'A4000') represents the Revenue line item for every dimension that makes up the Actual financial data item.

The following report shows the results of this calculation.

Related information

For more information on creating financial data items, see the following topic in the Financial Analyzer Help system: "Creating Financial Data Items."