Option to display list properties on a grid

fabio.casalegno

Customers very often request reports in which to show together properties and Time dimension as columns, similar to what they are used to see in an Excel:

As of today, this is quite difficult to build in Anaplan. The most common solutions to deliver this requirement are:

• OPTION A: Nest Time with line items on the columns and only show the properties in the first Time Period (and manually hide the property line items in the rest of the columns). Downside: requires quite some manual work to set up the view and sometimes it is not sustainable, since Time dimension can change, and the view needs to be re-adjusted by a Model Builder.

• OPTION B: Create dummy Time line Items together with properties. Downside: cannot use the benefits of native Time dimension, plus a mapping module from dummy time to real time is needed to connect to other modules.

These solutions are not optimal and can go against the Sustainability of good model design. Moreover, none of these two options work when you need to display properties AND filter the columns dynamically (e.g. depending on Version, display some months for Budget and other months for Forecast). The reason is that only number-formatted line items can be part of a line item subset.

Synchronized scrolling on the UX has made this possible using two parallel tables but, when there are many properties/months, horizontal scrolling is not user-friendly, and end-user filtering applies to only one of the tables:

 

A very easy solution would be to allow the option to display list properties on a grid. This should not be a very complex functionality to implement, in fact, it is already implemented for exports, where you can select the labels. Ideally, end-users would also be able to filter/sort on these columns, like normal line-items. Keeping consistency with the Planual recommendations, list properties should reference a system module in which this data is stored. This would also give some purpose to list properties, which today are barely used.

This solution would benefit the broad community: end-users would be able to have a more complete and friendly interface for their planning, and model builders would not need to think of suboptimal solutions to deliver this type of report.

fabio.casalegno

Update: There is another solution that was published by a colleague a while ago in the Community that works with dynamic filtering:

https://community.anaplan.com/t5/Anaplan-Platform/Convert-Line-Items-to-Time-Periods/m-p/133270/highlight/false#M34487

 

However, to go one step further, it would be nice to be able to do this with a simpler set-up, native functionality, that does not require to work with nested dimensions.

david.savarin

From what i understood regarding anaplan best practices is to avoid lists properties.

The ideal would be to be able to combine multiple modules into one grid for instance one attributes module and one data with time dimension module into a single grid.

Provided they share common dimensions, that would solve these display issues