About Rules

In Profitability and Cost Management, rules control how costs and revenues are distributed throughout the application to specified accounts or elements.

A driver can used to determine how the funds are allocated. The calculated results are assigned from a source to a destination as the funds flow through the application.

You set up distribution allocations for a single POV by creating rule sets and rules:

• Rule sets are groups of Profitability and Cost Management rules that help to organize calculation logic definitions, to calculate similar rules together, and to simplify the definition of manay rules that share common dimension members. Rule sets run in a set order, determined by the rule set sequence number, and may also contain options specific to the execution of rules within that rule set.

• Rules define the calculation logic of Profitability and Cost Management applications and enable them to reflect the cost assignments within the modeled situations. Rules within rule sets are executed in the order of their sequence numbers within that rule set. You can define allocation source, destination, Driver, and offset for each allocation rule in a rule set. (Creating Custom Calculation Rules).

Note:

See Creating and Managing Rules with the Manage Rules Screen and Creating and Managing Rules with the Designer Features for rule management details.

See Troubleshooting Calculation Issues to review the tools available to monitor and review calculation results.

Types of Rules

In a Profitability and Cost Management application, there are two types of rules:

• Allocation rules, which determine the source and destination of allocated data, which drivers are applied to that data, and where offsets are placed to balance accounts (Creating Allocation Rules with the Manage Rules Screen)

• Custom calculation rules, which contain formulas in MDX format and are primarily used for adjusting data or creating Driver values used in subsequent allocation rules (Creating Custom Calculation Rules).

Both types of rules are organized under rule sets. Rule sets run in their sequence number order, and then the rules within a set run in the order of their sequence numbers. Rules with the same sequence number can run at the same time, provided the computer hardware allows for parallel execution of processes. Rules can be copied within rule sets.

You can use contexts to define dimension and member defaults for both types of rules, either for all rules in a POV or for all rules in a rule set.

Dimension Member Defaults, or Contexts

You can set up defaults, called contexts, for each level of allocations for a POV in Profitability and Cost Management applications:

• The Global context enables you to define default definitions for dimensions that will be used in all rule definitions for that POV.

• Rule Set contexts enable you to define default dimension definitions for all rules in a given rule set.

Ways to Create and Manage Rules

The following are the main topics that describe how to work with Profitability and Cost Management rules:

• Creating Allocation Rules with the Manage Rules Screen

• Creating Allocation Rules with the Designer Screen

Both the Express Editing and Designer features support mass editing, but only the Designer features offer complete rule creation and management options. If you're new to Profitability and Cost Management, you may find it convenient to begin working with the Designer features.