Quarter to date with detail by, but having one block referencing full quarter.

Question

Hi! The intent of this screen would have been to see what QTD actuals are as of month 2 (february) close.

* Compare february QTD actuals to february QTD forecast
* Detail #1 by month
* Compare full quarter forecast to QTD actuals
* to then calculate remaining forecast to spend

I believe I can do #1 by having two pagers, one for quarter, and one for month. Then I have the blocks for #1 do yearly cumulative value with cycle of 3.

But I'm lost after that. I don't know how to do #2 detail them by month. I don't know how to have #3 show where it is referencing the full quarter in a way that the end user doesn't have to go into the layout.

Emil Amante · Answer

hi robert! Thanks for the response! This would technically work, however we determined with our system integrator that perhaps the easiest and poweruser friendly way for this would be to create opex cubes that are dimensioned by quarter, to avoid having to create screen triggers everytime we have this use case. It is quite a common use case, where we want to see what is remaining forecast left for quarter.

Robert Barkaway · Answer

Hi Emil,

If I understand correctly you're trying to do something like this

Basically my screen select is picking the current quarter, which enables me to break out the months of the quarter for actuals and plan to compare them, it also enables me to have the full quarter total at the end just by not Detailing by month. For the quarter to date I have a refer to selecting the current month and then as you rightly said a YTD function with a cycle of 3, the refer to could be dynamically applied by a screen trigger using the Apply to Block procedure function.

If you wanted the month break out to only show the months to date, you could use a flag for the months to display and multiply the values by that, but detail by with algorithms doesn't repeat the blocks together, you'd get this instead

You could either populate a cube with just the months for quarter to date, or you'd maybe need to look at splitting it into two layouts with the month breakout in the first and the summaries in the second, that way you wouldn't need to use Detail By and it would display as you want, something like this:

Does that help at all?