🧩Mixing Numeric & Percentage Line items in Line-Item Subsets (LIS) - Use Ratio summary

Bhumit285

When working with Line-Item Subsets (LIS) in Anaplan, you might’ve noticed something tricky - LIS works beautifully when your report mixes numeric values like Revenue and Cost, but the moment you introduce a percentage-based line item (like Margin %), things start breaking at the summary level.

Recently, while building a financial report, we got this idea:

📊 The Situation

My LIS included the following line items:

• Revenue
• Cost
• Margin %

At the month level, everything looked perfect. But when I rolled up the data to the quarter level, my Margin % started showing incorrect results —because the line item summary was set to SUM.

Essentially, Anaplan was summing the monthly ratios instead of recalculating them using the quarterly totals.

Even though the original formula was:

Margin % = (Revenue - Cost) / Revenue

the quarterly summary became misleading — it was simply adding up percentages instead of deriving the true ratio from aggregated values.

🧠 The Fix — Using Helper Line Items for Correct Aggregation

To address this, I had to separate the calculation logic and introduce helper line items within my LIS module.

Here’s how I solved it 👇

1. Created two helper line items:
   • Margin % Numerator = Revenue - Cost
   • Margin % Denominator = Revenue
2. Set both helper line items’ summaries to SUM(so they aggregate correctly across time and hierarchy)
3. Set Summary method = Ratio in my target line item:
   • Ratio Numerator: Margin % Numerator
   • Ratio Denominator: Margin % Denominator

Now, the model recalculates Margin % dynamically at Quarter and Year level —no more inflated or misleading ratios 🎯

💡 Key Takeaway

Whenever you’re working with Line-Item Subsets that combine numeric and percentage-based metrics:

• Use helper line items to separate numerator and denominator logic.
• Set the summary method to Ratio instead of SUM or Formula.
• Always validate calculations at higher levels of hierarchy to ensure data integrity.

Accurate ratio aggregation is critical in FP&A, reporting, and modeling and this small design tweak can save you from big interpretation errors in your executive dashboards.

Never sum ratios. Always recalculate them.

Bhumit285

But There’s One More Thing to Consider

After introducing a ratio summary to correctly calculate your percentage line items

,you also need to make sure that your numeric measures (Revenue, Cost, etc.) are still aggregating as expected.

Here’s the key:

For non-percentage line items, the denominator should be 1 at all Level, and the summary method of that denominator line item should be set to Formula.

This ensures that:

• Numeric items (like Revenue, Cost) sum up normally across time and hierarchy.
• Percentage items (like Margin %) recalculate dynamically using the ratio logic.
• Both behave correctly within the same LIS-driven report.

This balance between SUM and RATIO logic keeps your report consistent and mathematically sound across all aggregation levels.

Hope this will help! 😊