Circular References

Hi All, 

 

This is a pretty usual issue that I have seen others encounter as well but wanted to check if you have an elegant way of making it work. I am trying to calculate the available inventory at hand on a particular day using the closing stock on the previous day. So Day 1 would pick closing stock of Day 0 and calculate the available inventory of Day 1, which will then be fed to Day 2 as opening inventory to calculate the Available inventory for day 2. 

 

You can see the problem lies in the fact that Available Inventory = Opening Inventory + other stuff, whereas Opening Inventory = Previous day's Available inventory

 

Another complication I have is that we are using a dummy time list instead of the default time dimension. 

Let me know if you have a solution apart from creating an import that has to be refreshed after every iteration. 

Answers

  • It is the use of dummy time that complicates this. 

    Use of the PREVIOUS function would be a quick solution but this is not possible with without Anaplan time dimension. 

    Therefore, create a staging module using Anaplan time, map your opening value into the staging module. Calculate the closing balance using PREVIOUS to pull in the opening balance / closing balance from previous time period.

    Then map this back into the original module using the same mapping. 

    The exact mapping is unimportant as the important thing is that you use the same logic to map in and then back out. Anaplan time is simply utilised to take advantage of time functions such as PREVIOUS.