It would be helpful to have an “aggregation operator” property that would apply to a hierarchy.

dsoomar

For example, consider the following hierarchy, applied to a module, with the following values:

 

Net Income: $10

Gross Margin: $40

Sales: $100

Cost of Sales: $60

Operating Expense: $30

 

Clients would prefer to see Cost of Sales as a positive number. In aggregating, they would want to see Cost of Sales subtracted from Sales to arrive at a positive Gross Margin number.

 

The obvious answer here is that we create line items to represent this logic.

 

Yes, we can do that, but now imagine you have a 10,000 account hierarchy, and you need to pull data into a module that is dimensionalized by Account. You are now in a position of managing 10,000 formulas to pull data from a record table into your dimensionalized planning + reporting module.

 

This idea would significantly reduce the amount of calculations and tracking required to perform this logic. In short, the idea is that if we could enable a property that would let us specify whether an item, upon aggregating, should subtract the value stored at that intersection or add it.