Dimensions, Members, Cubes and Templates

These terms may be familiar if you have previously been involved in a BI project. If you have, you may have come across the terms “Member” and “Dimension” in which case, much of what follows should be familiar.

Here is a video, or read below.

Dimensions, Members, Attributes & Measures

Throughout the FastClose User Interface you will see a variety of ball icons with various symbols within. This is a guide to what these symbols mean.

A dimension is a way of looking at your data, a perspective. We could analyse our data by year, month or customer. By salesman, geography or department. Each of these are different perspectives and thus different dimensions.

Dimensions are represented within FastClose using a D in a blue ball.

A dimension is a way of looking at your data, a perspective, and will usually correspond to a column in your database. For example: year, month, customer etc… they are all things you can use to analyse, slice and dice your data.

A dimension will usually specify both a code and a caption for the items within it (which are known as members).

So a customer dimension would contain a member with a code and caption for each customer. For example “Kermit’s Lilly Pad Co.” which might use that text as the Caption whilst using an identifying code such as 00010, say, which can be used to reference it, which is both shorter and easier to type.

Similarly an account nominal might have a code like 4000 corresponding to a caption of “Sales Revenue”

Members

Dimensions are made up of members. For example a Month dimension would be made up of the members: January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December.

Members are represented within FastClose using an M in a blue ball

Attributes

Dimensions such as “Customer”, as well as having a code and caption, often come with a lot of other additional information. These additional columns are known as attributes and are represented in FastClose using an A in a blue and white ball

These are properties that relate, describe and belong to it. They can be text, numbers, dates or Booleans and provide further information regarding a member of a dimension.

For example, a customer’s attributes might include company name, their address, city and zip code. Eg:

and might further extend to the Salesman who sold the deal, the sales region and so on.

Attributes are defined at the dimension level, so if one member has an attribute all members of that dimension will have it (even if empty). This makes it possible to display or query them for every member of a dimension.

In fact in FastClose you can treat an attribute like a simple form of a dimension, one that has a code but no caption. As such you can both view them in reports and filter on them. So in this example we could use a filter on Post Town, to look at beer provided to all the pubs in the town of Rugby as a whole.

“Measures” – A Special Dimension

In every report there is one special dimension, known as the “Measures” dimension represented within FastClose using a $ in a green ball

The dollar sign is used because Measures are most commonly financial.

Measures are things you can add up, For example an Inventory report might have a measures dimension that includes members such as “Quantity” and “Total Cost”, items that help answer questions about inventory. By contrast a GL report might have a measures dimension that includes the members “Amount” and “Budget” that would help a user understand their actuals in the GL Chart of Accounts against numbers previously budgeted.

So you have different measures dimensions in different reports helping answer different questions; it is this feature that enables a GL report to answer questions about GL activities whilst an Inventory report answers questions about Inventory.

Templates & Cubes

FastClose ships with a large number of predefined templates organised into modules (GL, AR, AP etc…) which can be found on the “Templates” tab of the “Home” dialog.

Each template report is the starting point to build new reports and relies on a single cube.

A cube is a collection of dimensions together with some measures that give access to specific datasets and enable users to answer a variety of business questions. One cube may have several different template showing different orientations of how it can be used.

Dimensions are reused and often appear in many different cubes.

For example, practically every cube will have some sort of Year and Month dimensions whilst a customer dimension would appear in GL and AR cubes as well as elsewhere.

Summary

All the terms we have used so far: Members, Dimensions, “Measures”, Cubes and so on, are all things that describe the data and the ways that it can be analysed in FastClose. They describe a dataset and make it available as a data source in FastClose; a collection of numbers and perspectives (dimensions) with which to understand them. But, they tell us nothing about the layout and organisation of reports that may be built using these data sources – as you saw earlier, that comes from you, the designer.