04.03 Hierachies - Get Started with the Samples

The most common hierarchies that one comes across in FastClose, are the P&L and the Balance Sheet.

Whilst you can build these from scratch – we recommend you start with one of our prebuilt samples and amend it to match your chart of accounts, as we’ve already worked out the maths.

Here is a video, or read below.

Opening a Sample P&L

The samples can be found in the Solutions area of the “Home” dialog, within “01 GL P&Ls, Balance Sheets etc”

Depending on whether you are holding your Budgets (within your ERP, or within the FastClose Planning feature), select the relevant subfolder.

Then navigate according to how you wish your numbers to be displayed:

• Naturally Signed : the numbers shown come from the ERP exactly as stored ie: revenues -ve, expenses +ve

• Positive Signed : both revenues and expense shown as +ve

• Reverse Signed : revenues ahown as +ve, expenses -ve

Within each of those the same set of P&Ls exist showcasing various layout but all sharing the same main hierarchy.

Open the “P&L Cumulative This Year To Date with Target” sample.

When the report opens it will show you some guidance, including a link to this video, that walks you through the setup process. This mirrors what is discussed here also.

Switch to the “Insert” tab, and select “Hierarchies”…

…which will display the hierarchy list dialog.

This has a single pre-built hierarchy defined, which we then amend to match the chart of accounts of your business, so click on edit.

Hierarchies are used to combine leaf level data, aggregating it to create information that was not stored in the ERP. For example, there could be a number of different “Office Expense” nominals that all rollup to a single consolidated “Office Expenses” item (as shown above) that will then be seen on the P&L.

The idea here is to amend the sample so that the nominals that fall into each area, match your chart of accounts.

If you expand each node, you will see the items that make them up. Eg:

Amend the ranges or add individual items from the picker on the left to match your chart of accounts. If your accounts don’t form one contiguous range you can add further ranges alongside, to build the complete structure.

You might also want to add further groupings, particularly expenses to mirror your business.

On the right hand side of the currently selected node is an “Add” button that can be used to add additional nodes alongside or if the current node is an aggregated node, beneath as well.

The hierarchy supports the following node types:

• Aggregated – Use this node to add a node to the hierarchy that will then have children added to it.

• Range – Position a Range node to add a range of members from the ERP at a particular point in the hierarchy. Eg: 1000:2999 would add any members in the number range of 1000 to 2999

• Wildcard – Position a Wildcard node to add all members from the ERP that match a particular pattern eg: AB* would add any members whose first two characters are “AB” followed by anything else.

• Calculated – Most commonly used to place a calculated item into a hierarchy. For example in a chart of accounts, ratios such as Gross Margin %. A calculated node is also useful to select members that don’t form a contiguous group in the dimension.

• Whitespace / Label – A whitepace / label node can be used to insert a row of whitespace into the report, or a row of whitespace with a label at any point in the hierarchy.

In addition, hierarchies also support leaf nodes. These are added from the list of all the members in the hierarchy dimension that is displayed on the left hand side of the dialog. Double clicking on a member will add it at the currently selected location.

Best practice:

If possible use aggregated nodes with ranges rather than wildcards, calculated nodes or single lead nodes.

• They will automatically pick up new codes that are added to the ERP without the need to edit and save the report.

• They won’t pick up codes of random length eg: 1* will pick up 10, 100, 199, 1000 etc… In account hierarchies, the longer codes often imply more granular data.

• Calculated nodes can achieve the same thing but don’t provide an expansion control on the row to reveal the constituent data points.

Node settings vary depending on the type of node but the common controls are shown below:

Hierarchy Validation

FastClose will validate the hierarchy when closing the dialog to check for any obvious issues. Where the system detects that data would be included twice between two different non-calculation nodes for example, it will provide an error message to help the user track down the problem which could otherwise lead to “double-counting”.

In addition there is also a hierarchy report tool in the dialog. This checks the hierarchy against the source dimension looking for members that have not been included anywhere in the hierarchy. This can be useful where the user wants to determine the degree of completeness of the structure.

A further numerical check can be carried out using the so called “Check Node”. This can be found at the bottom of the hierarchy and looks like this:

The calculation range should be amended to pick up the entire P&L and the node unhidden.

After closing the Hierarchy Editor, also close the parent dialog, which will ask if you want to update the shared library copy of the hierarchy OR unsubscribe.

If you intend your work to be used by everyone select “update” otherwise select “unsubscribe” – if you selected “Update” all the other Sample P&Ls will now pick up your work.

Setting the Sales Account Range

Finally we need to edit the “SalesAccountRange” variable which is used in the conditions of various calcs and in the hierarchy, to get the math right.

Go to “Insert->Variables” and update the SalesAccountRange variable to match your range of revenue account nominals

If the sales account range is not contiguous, commas separated ranges or individual nominals can be placed in it.

Finally we can now run the report.

Confirm the numbers in the check node match the Net Profit. If they do, you can hide the “Check node” calc again in the hierarchy editor, but if there is a mismatch, some nominals are missing and some trouble shooting needs doing.