Overview

Many reports and templates come with convenient time based summarising “buckets” pre-configured so that we don’t have to work or think in terms of dates.

After all, it is usually more convenient to be able to think about “Period 4” for example than something like 01/04/2025:30/04/2025 when building a summarised report.

But many do not, or don't have the right date spans over the right date fields.

In this situation, you can use Bucketing to create your own summarised reporting based on the dates that appear in your data.

Here is a video, or read below.

Working with Bucketing

Anywhere that you have data that includes dates, you have an opportunity to make use of bucketing, be it Invoice Dates, Due Dates, Shipping Dates, Need By Dates and many more.

The key is to first identify the date field that you want to summarise your data on and with that in mind, switch to the “Insert” tab and click on the “Bucketing” option in the toolbar.

This will open the Bucketing dialog, where you can configure the buckets desired.

Bucketing Dialog, shown with sample 30 day aging buckets configured

Reports can have bucketing configured on more than one time dimension but this is unusual. Typically, there would be just one bucketed date configuration in a report.

A bucketing configuration represents a new Bucketing Dimension that will be created in FastClose.

As such, like all dimensions, it has a Name and Caption. In addition it specifies

the related date dimension that it is based on
a starting date, that the buckets are measure relative to
and then a list of buckets, each one a member of this bucketed dimension, each having
- a name and a caption
- and a duration (which is used to calculate the range on the right hand side.

The starting date can just be whatever today is, a fixed date (in which case an optional control to amend it can be provided in the filters area), or an “As Of” date controlled by an “As Of” variable in the Variables view (NB: this is useful if the As Of date is being applied to other dates in the report as well. As Of variables can only be added in the Variables dialog, in Advanced mode).

A new bucketing configuration is added to the report using the "Add Buckets" control, top left

which provides the options of:

Aging Buckets - the classic 30 day bucket setup going out into the past, commonly used in Aged Debt. Includes additional "Future" and "GT180" buckets at either end.
Monthly Date Buckets - 12, month long buckets, projected out into the future (be sure to amend February if it’s a leap year!)
Weekly Date Buckets - 52, seven day week buckets, projected out into the future
Daily Buckets - A user defined number of single day buckets projected out into the future
Custom Buckets - an empty dimension ready to be populated with whatever length buckets are required

Bucketing dimension definitions can be Cut / Copy / Pasted between this report and other reports. They can also be stored and subscribed to, in the Library.

Finally, on closing the dialog, the dimension created will automatically be added to the across axis and a bucket selection filter created.

An example Bucketed report showing the number of shipments by customer by month

Exercises and Tutorial Survey

Now try the downloadable exercises below:

05.05 Date Bucketing - Exercises.pdf

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