Best practice of Built-in vs. user-defined time and version dimensions

PrevContributor
PrevContributor
in Modeling

I understand that the “built-in” time and version dimensions are “optional," and a model builder can build user-defined time and version dimensions in Analplan. Best Practice Question: Are most Anaplan customers using built-in time and version dimensions or do they build their own (user-defined) time and version dimensions from scratch? Any pros/cons for using built-in versus user-defined  time/version dimensions?

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  • PrevContributor
    PrevContributor
    Answer ✓
    Ned,

    Most customers use the built-in timescale options in their model(s), but there are cases where a client will want to define their own timescale, such as mapping months to custom quarters (i.e. Q1 = Feb, Mar, Apr, Q2 = May, Jun, Jul, ...).  The advantage to using a predefined timescale in Anaplan is the ability to use the Date & Time functions that you can view at this link on Community ( https://community.anaplan.com/anapedia/calculation-functions ).  If you do not have time as a dimension then you would not be able to use any of the functions that require a timescale (i.e. MONTH, OFFSET, POST, etc.).  The idea is similar for Versions, most use the Versions in the Settings Tab, which allows the use of Switchover, Bulk Copy, and functions such as ISACTUALVERSION and ISCURRENTVERSION (also on Community). There are cases where a user may want to have actuals and variance but they do not want to have variance in every module that has Versions as a dimension.

    Thanks,
    Ryan

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