Consider whether you need allocations

Many business processes require an amount recorded at one level to be distributed across other parts of the business.

For example, suppose you have a corporate marketing budget of $1 million that must be allocated across regions and products. The allocation might use each region's sales as the basis for determining its share.

Conceptually:

Corporate Marketing Budget → Regions → Products

Allocations are useful for business requirements such as distributing:

• Costs across departments
• Revenue across business units
• Budgets across products or markets
• Shared expenses according to a business driver

Both ASO and BSO support allocations, so the need for an allocation does not automatically determine your cube type.

Consider instead how allocations fit into the broader business process. If the Essbase application requires several calculation steps, calculations performed in a particular sequence, or other processing before or after an allocation, those requirements may point toward BSO.