Understanding Trees in Activity-Based Management

Trees add a visual layer and hierarchical structure, letting you see where detail items (such as departments and accounts) fit into your organization's structure and letting you navigate to the appropriate level of detail. Use trees to organize and maintain Activity-Based Management objects and dimensions and to simplify reporting needs. Visually establish and change the rules for summarizing detail elements. When the summarization rules change, for example, simply update the tree; the system automatically reflects your revisions everywhere within the tree. You can also use trees to summarize or combine financial results from all segments of your organization.

While you definitely want your financial reporting systems to manage detailed information, their greatest value comes from their ability to consistently summarize huge volumes of information for management reporting. Whether you're an accountant, CFO, tax manager, product manager, or sales manager, chances are that you're only concerned with a portion of your organization's database—a particular level of information. Yet, at the same time, you also have to summarize and look at the big picture. Trees give you the option to easily view information at any level.

There are three main reasons to use PeopleSoft trees with your Activity-Based Management application:

• Reporting.

• Processing.

• Security.