Manage inputs to Management Reporting

KayK
KayK
edited February 15 in Best Practices

Author: Kay Kuang is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Principal Data and Insights Architect at Anaplan.

Management Reporting is a great dashboard type in Anaplan. It looks clean, professional, and provides a familiar PowerPoint look to people while it is powered by the live data from the Anaplan model. It is a wonderful format for any occasion with repeatable presentations, like business reviews and presentations to leadership. It can save end users a lot of time to collect data and prepare the slides, especially if their team is huge and everyone needs to do the same thing.

However, one of the limitations of Management Reporting is that it doesn’t allow inputs on the Management Reporting pages. Providing comments to the data is sometimes a critical part of the presentation during business reviews. Without this capability, end users may feel constrained on Management Reporting use cases.

To navigate around this and to maximize the benefits that Management Reporting can provide, I am going to share an approach to help. In summary, instead of just having one Management Reporting page, you can create another board dashboard for end user to enter inputs. So you will have a dashboard for presentation and one dashboard for entering input.

Below you'll find several examples and tips:

  1. Create all the input tables in the Input Dashboard. Dimension the input tables by how you want to filter the data. If the inputs change every quarter, you can consider adding Quarter as one dimension. If every end user will need to enter their own input, you can consider adding users as one dimension. (Note: if a module is dimensioned by user, then users who are not workspace admin can’t see the data entered by other users. Keep it in mind if other users need to see the inputs when adding user dimension.)Example 1: inputs table in the Input Dashboard
    Manage Inputs to MR 1.png
    Example 2: Management Reporting layout. The benefit of this you can style the inputs however you want for the presentation.
    Manage Inputs to MR 2.png
  2. Numbering the actions that end users need to take on Input dashboard to fill out all the data needed. You can add the link to the Management Reporting as the last step to prompt end users to validate Management Reporting populates as they want to.
    Manage Inputs to MR 3.png
  3. Add data tables or graphs to prompt end user to enter their inputs. Having the same data published on the Input Dashboard saves end users time to jump back and forth to the Management Reporting to view the data before they can enter their comments.
  4. Consider having the Input Dashboard open on a different screen when presenting just in case anything needs to be changed on the spot or some notes need to be added.

Questions? Leave a comment!

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