PREVIOUS FUNCTION, summary issues

LucaRicci

Hi all,

I am having an issue using the PREVIOUS function. In this project I have a timeline split in quarters, semesters and years, thus I should be able to see the values from the previous quarter, semsester and year in the line item called "Previous period".

It seems to be working for the quarterly values while it fails the semesterly (and probably yearly too) values. In fact, H2 FY22 should be displaying 16,156 in place of 11,304.

For some reason, the line item I created does not allow me to put "formula" in both summary and time summary at the same time. I believe that is why it is not working properly.

Can you help me, please?

Thank you in advance

BrunoRodriguez

Hello @LucaRicci ,

Previous only applies to the lowest level of granularity of the module (quarters in your case). As you can see in your time summary, "Time:Sum" means that whatever the data you acquire with previous, it gets aggregated for the time summaries (i.e., half year and financial year).

If what you want is to achieve correct time summaries, you may have to play with Ratio (https://help.anaplan.com/32821c05-3e6c-4b36-b04e-2fb840418936-Summary-methods). In such a way that you could for example do the following:

1. You have your original item defined with previous (let's call it Line item 1)
2. Create a line item dimensioned by Half Year (let's call it Line item 2)
3. Make Previous (or offset) in there, so you get the value from the previous half year.
4. Create a non-dimensioned line item that is always 1 - and apply average as summary method (let's call it Line item 3)
5. Apply Ratio to Line item 1, where the ratio formula is Line item 2 / Line Item 3.
6. Your previous Half year should be displayed as a summary now.
7. Rinse and repeat concatenating them for yearly summaries!

I hope that makes sense!