...Restatements

One of the topics that I have spent time on is to understand the most efficient way to restate reported data in HFM.

On one side, there are multiple applications which either do not handle this requirement or the process to maintain and analyse the data is too complicated.

• The most usual case is to restate the P12 data. To handle this requirement, there are applications with an additional period P13 to handle the late adjustments. I think that this approach has been inherited by the design of the most ERPs.

•  Another case is to restate the data from all the periods and not only the P12 data in case of a change in the reporting standards or an audit. In this case, there are applications that have a specific scenario which is called RestatementX.

•  In a similar case of restatement, in order to restate the data of all periods, the application had two sets of accounts. The accounts with the reported data and the accounts with the restated data. The restated accounts had the accounts with the reported data as share members in addition to the unique restating accounts.

• Finally, there are applications that do not maintain the reported data and before posting the adjustments, the users must run and hardcode all the values in order to keep the reported figures (bad, bad, bad)

On the other side, HFM is a really powerful and flexible tool and we should use it in order to transform the focus of our processes from data intensive to data analysis.

This means that we should be able to restate our numbers without much effort, without having to copy data from one scenario to another or one period to another and at the same time allow us to audit the numbers and trace the flow of the change. The easiest way to implement such change is to introduce a new dimension in the HFM application (HFM version 11 has unlimited number of dimensions) which will allow us to introduce versioning. 

As an example, let’s say that you will use Custom5 as your version dimension. Custom5 will have 3 members: [None], Restatement and AllCustom5. The [None] member will be linked with Phase 1 and the Restatement member will be linked with Phase 2. The process is simple. The users will load all the initial data in the member [None] and you will lock Phase 1. These data are the reported data. When you will need to Restate your numbers, the users will load any adjustments in the member Restatement and you will lock the Phase 2. 

In this way, when you will retrieve data from [None], you will read the reported data and when you will retrieve data from AllCustom5, you will read the restated data.

Disclaimer: The above example is really simple and will not cover all the cases. Allow your phantasy to work and adapt this mechanism in your requirements.

...Smartview and OneDrive

Recently (July 2017), I discovered a new functionality of OneDrive which allows multiple users to work on the same file concurrently and I think it is called real time collaboration. This seems to be an amazing feature if you are preparing a presentation and you are collaborating with someone who is in the other side of the world. Unfortunately, it can be a huge inconvenience if you are using SmartView.

...Financial reports and Shared Services

A few months ago, we were ready for our monthly submission. Everything was quiet and I was relaxed enjoying our Cloud environment...until we received an alert from our monitoring tool that the first of the two FR WebLogic servers auto-restarted. Of course, having a WebLogic server auto-restarting was not a problem since that was the process. Until five minutes later

...Records & Subcubes in HFM

A few years ago, I decided to spend time to understand how HFM calculation engine works with aim to improve the performance of the rules. The first stop was the HFM manual, the basic design considerations and the section that is referring to subcubes to understand the calculation mechanism.

...loading APP files in HFM

I have not posted any thoughts recently because I am working on an amazing migration to the Cloud project and I spend most of my time there. However, recently I got in a situation which reminded me of a discussion that I had a few months ago in OTN. The discussion was related with issues that users had with loading APP files in their upgraded applications.

In my case, we were working on upgrading the applications from 11.1.2.1 to 11.1.2.4. We followed the process suggested by Oracle and we upgraded 11.1.2.1 to 11.1.2.3 and then moved the applications to 11.1.2.4. When I started testing the upgraded applications I found that in one out of the three applications it was not possible to extract and reload the extracted metadata without corrupting the application.

...Org by Period

Recently, in the OTN forum, we were discussing the functionality of Org by Period.

Org by Period specifies whether the application allows new consolidation structures to co-exist with previous consolidation structures in the same application.  If it will be set to ‘Y’, it will enable the functionality to activate or deactivate legal entities by reporting period.

As an example, let's consider entity AB which should be consolidate to parent A for period P1 to P3 and then consolidated to parent B for periods P4 to P12. In order to achieve this, in the Ownership management module the entity would be flagged as Active under parent A for periods P1 to P3 and then it will be flagged as Inactive. For periods P4 to P12, the entity will be flagged as Inactive for parent entity A and Active for parent entity B.

Based on this, the parent entity A would retain the values on a YTD basis for only the data that came from P1 to P3.  Data from periods P4 to P12 would be only consolidate to Parent B.

Finally, the metadata would show the entity underneath both Parent A and Parent B, though the various metadata selector dialogs have a "show active only" button when you want to show only the current period's active structure.

Cheers,

Thanos

...the consolidation functionality

It is two days before the end of the year-end reporting period and at 4:50 pm the helpdesk receives a new ticket with title “Consolidation of subsidiaries and NCI query”.

Silence in front of my screen… the subject of the ticket is quite worrying for such a week and as I read further down the situation becomes even worst.  The request of the user was to explain how the system calculates the NCI for specific subsidiaries, why the closing balance was 150.000$ and what the movement consolidation movement represents. A lot of questions….

Proem

Until today, I have seen four approaches in consolidating the values of an entity to the parent entity.

• The first approach is to create manual journals at "Entity Curr Adjs". This journal will be posted both at the subsidiary and at the consolidation entity of the group.
• The second approach is to use the Sub Calculate and the function HS.Exp in order to populate specific members or consolidation accounts at the value dimension members "Entity Currency" / "Entity Curr Adjs".
• The third approach is to use the Sub Calculate and the function HS.Exp in order to populate specific members or consolidation accounts at the value dimension members [Proportion] / [Elimination].

... FDM batchloader

It’s been almost two months since my last post but I can say that all this time I had been working on a module that it is really interested but I had not worked before.

So in this post, I am going to describe my experience with FDM Batchloader. I know that it is a bit outdated topic since FDM has been replaced by FDMEE but in my defence not all the companies have upgraded yet.

Proem

As a summary, FDM Batchloader is a module that automates the steps that the user has to execute in order to import a text file with ERP data in the FDM tables, map the data to the HFM or Essbase members and finally load them in HFM or Essbase.

...Debugging HFM rules

Hi all,

I hope you are doing well. I just came back from a 3-weeks holidays ready for a new year hopefully full with Hyperion projects and consolidation challenges.

Proem

Last night I was discussing in the OTN forum on how to debug a complex set of rules. This discussion brought into my mind the multiple times during the last project that I was in the same situation and I was trying to find a problem in a mechanism that includes triggers, variables and multiple HFM expressions.

Unfortunately when you are working on a complex set of rules with different cases and different statements, it is really easy to make a mistake and misread or misinterpret the existing rules.

For this reason, I believe that the easiest way to find the solution to your problem is

...FDM reclassifications with logic accounts

I was recently discussing (with my wife) about the various HFM reclassification journals (VAT, Corporate tax, Cash/Overdraft) and it occurred to me that the easiest way to complete this task is with the proper configuration and design of the FDM application.

Proem

When designing an FDM – HFM solution, my understanding is that FDM should be used to replace all the manual, time consuming, non-value-added data-management steps of the ETL process while moving data from the ERP to HFM.

This design has 2 main guidelines:

• The extract query from the ERP system should not exclude any of the data. The main reason of this guideline is to prevent the exclusion of any future ERP changes to be extracted in the extract file.

...locking entities in HFM

Hi all,

Recently, I was working on an assignment to start locking the entities in an HFM application with 8 scenarios, 9 years of data and 600 base entities.

The options were the following:

1. Should we lock only the base entities?
2. Should we lock both the base entities and the parents?
3. Should we not lock anything? 

In the end, we decided that the best approach is