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Customize your dimension groups to enhance the analysis capabilities in your financial statements.

Dimensions and dimension groups

A dimension is a subset of data. Dimensions give organization and structure to your data and form the basis of all analysis in Phocas. In Financial Statements, you see the list of dimensions on the left side of the grid. You use these dimensions to add levels to the statement and filter the data to focus on specific information.

In a financial database, you always have top-level dimensions for Category and Account, but you typically have other sub-dimensions based on those dimensions, such as Sub Category, Region, and Branch. These sub-dimensions are referred to as dimension groups and they also display in the dimension list.

Dimension groups are useful for many reasons but they’re particularly valuable :

• If your business has a long list of things, such as lots of departments or cost centers. For example, you could create groups for each type of store (franchise or independent) or each size of store (small, medium, or large).

• If your business is project-based. You can have individual groups for each project.

• If you want to analyze consolidated results. You might want to group your entities in a certain way to help with your analysis.

• If you want to reclassify items, something that might be unavailable in your ERP.

What you can do

You can edit an existing dimension group (change its name or define the order of its items), delete a group that is not in use, or add a new group to meet your business needs.

Your changes are saved in the underlying database design and, therefore, available to all users who have access to that database. Your groups are included in favorites and dashboards and also available for use in the Analytics and Budgets and Forecasts modules.

Manage groups in Financial Statements

INTRO

1. Click the Settings button > Groups in the top right corner.

   

2. In the Groups window, select the dimension for which you want to manage groups, for example, Branch. Each entity in that dimension is displayed as a row in the grid. If any groups exist for that dimension, they are displayed as columns in the grid.

3. Proceed to add new groups or edit or delete the groups as required.

Filter the items

• Properties: If there are many properties against a particular dimension, you can see which ones you want to bring in to help you classify your items.

• Activity: , so that you have some, you know, branches and stuff with no activity. You can still map them.

• Mapped and unmapped: and we'll be looking to move the match and unmet options into this kebab menu as we want them to be column specific. So that's a bit of work we're working on at the moment.

Search for an item:

Sort by a range:

Import export from Excel.

Add a group

1. With the required dimension selected in the Groups window, click New Grouping… A new column with a default name (Dimension 1) displays in the grid.

2. Change the default name to something more meaningful, for example, Branch Manager.

3. Select the rows of the items in the grid and type the name of the new entity into the new group column and press Enter. You can select multiple rows and assign them to the same entity. For example, select four branches and add Karen as the branch manager. After you enter one or more entities, you can then select those entities from the list. Specify the dimension the groups are based on. / Specify which group each entity in the dimension belongs to.

4. Repeat the above step to assign the other rows to an entity.

5. Select one of these options:

   • Click Build Now to rebuild the database with your changes and view the results.

   • Click Save and close. Your changes will take effect on the next database build.

The new groups display in the applicable position in the dimension list next to the statement grid. For example, if you added a group for Branch Manager…

Edit a group

1. In the Groups window, with the required dimension selected,

Delete a group

1. In the Groups window, with the required dimension selected,

View groups in Designer

TO DO

In Designer, adds a child to underlying database. Lock icon shows it’s managed in FS.

See Modify a database > Customize dimensions (hide the code, create groups, and include a group as a property)