Copying Data in Financial Data Items

About the Copy Data feature

The copy data feature enables you to copy data from one financial data item to another. You can use the copy data process as a mechanism for moving data from one financial data item to another, or you can make use of a set of options that allow you to modify the data in addition to copying it.

You can use Financial Analyzer's copy data feature to perform the following types of tasks:

• Restructuring the data in your database

• Rolling up data from one time period to another

• Increasing the values in a slice of data by a percentage or absolute amount

• Setting a slice of data to NA, thereby effectively deleting it

• Creating a new budget based on the previous year's budget data

• Updating a budget to reflect a change in allocations

• Generating multiple what-if scenarios from a single source

Who can use the copy data feature?

Administrators

An administrator can copy data within his or her personal database, or between the personal database and the shared database.

The Operational Mode in the Options dialog box indicates how the data is copied. If the Operational Mode is set to Administrator, data is copied within the administrator's personal database. If the Operational Mode is set to Workstation, data is submitted to the Task Processor and copied within the administrator's shared database.

Budget workstation users

Users of Budget workstations can copy data only within their personal database.

Using the Copy Data Feature

You choose Copy Data from the Tools menu to copy data. This opens the Copy Data dialog box, where you specify the source financial data item and the target financial data item and select the dimension values that you want to copy.

In some cases, the source and target items are different. For example, when you are populating a new financial data item with data from an existing item, the source and target are different. In other cases, the source and target items are the same, such as when you are altering the data within a single financial data item.

Note that you can increase or decrease the data by a specific amount or percentage when it is copied from the source to the target. Alternatively (when the source and target are the same), you can set the data values to N/A, effectively deleting the data from the financial data item.

Example: Using the copy data feature

The following illustration shows the Copy Data dialog box with specifications to copy data from the Budget financial data item for one time period to the Budget financial data item for another time period, with an increase of 5%.

Using copy data profiles

If you periodically copy the same data, you can save the information as a copy data profile. A copy data profile captures the selection information in the Copy Data dialog box and saves it for reuse. You can apply the saved profile at a later time -- either exactly as is, or as a template for copying similar data.

To name and save a copy data profile, define the data slice to copy and choose Save Profile in the Copy Data dialog box. To retrieve a list of saved profiles, choose Profiles.

Related information

For more information about using the Copy Data feature, search for the following topics in the Financial Analyzer Help system:

"Creating a Copy Data Profile"

"Modifying Data in Financial Data Items"

"Setting Data to NA"

"Using a Copy Data Profile"