Configurable Consolidation Rules Best Practices

Use these best practices when working with configurable consolidation rules.

Refine the Scope of the Configurable Consolidation Rules

When you create a Configurable Consolidation Rule, it is recommended that you add as many dimensions and as few members of those dimensions to rules as required, thereby limiting their scope of execution, resulting in a narrower scope of execution and better performance.

Review Configurable Consolidation Rules carefully to ensure that they only include members that are necessary. If the dimensions are not specified, all members of that dimension are used for calculation by default.

For example, consider a Configurable Consolidation Rule with the following set of dimensions and number of members in each source POV.

When the scope of such rule is limited, for example, to use only one Custom1 and one Custom2 since the other members of Custom1/ Custom2 might not be needed, the impact is considerable. There are 98.4% fewer combinations, only 10,000 combinations to be processed.

When all other dimensions are taken into consideration, even greater improvements in performance will result.

Optimize Redirect/Target Conditions on Multiple Dimensions

Configurable Consolidation Rules allow users to create conditional target redirection based on members from various dimensions.

Having a large number of redirect conditions for multiple dimensions, has an impact on performance because it results in a large number of combinations of conditions.

As an example, consider the following Account & Product hierarchy:

Consider a Configurable Consolidation Rule having conditional redirections as below, assuming all other dimensions are set to appropriate members:

In the example above, each Account and Product dimension has three conditions, bringing the total number of possible combinations to 3*3=9. However, when the number of conditions grows across multiple dimensions, it leads to many possible combinations. For example, assuming 25 such conditions each in Account and Product dimensions would result in 25*25=625 combinations, which causes execution slowness due to wider scope.

For optimal execution times, it is best to split the ruleset into multiple rulesets. When the number of possible combinations (multiplying the number of conditions across all dimension redirections) is less than 250, rules do not need to be split. The above sample ruleset can be split as follows:

• Add members in the if conditions into source of the new rulesets.

• In the final rule, add members in source of original ruleset; exclude all those members considered in previous rulesets.

• The redirection conditions for Product dimension and other dimensions will stay unchanged in the newly created rulesets.

The Configurable Consolidation Rules are highly customizable, offering endless possibilities. In the preceding example, if the redirection conditions on Product were also based on Account dimension members, conditions and Source in the Product dimension of newly split rulesets could be carefully refined so that exclusive members were not included.

Resolving Configurable Consolidation Rule Warnings

When you create Configurable Consolidation rules, as part of the validation process, Financial Consolidation and Close provides warnings about issues that can cause performance degradation when you run the rule.

For example, you may receive a warning or recommendation to refine the scope of the Configurable Consolidation rules, or optimize Redirect/Target conditions on multiple dimensions. Use the Best Practices information in this topic to resolve the warnings.