Day Period

Marzena · September 2019

When using Weeks as a Calendar Type in Anaplan Time, there is no easy way to aggregate from days to months.

We would be able to use TIMESUM function, but you cannot used simple Dates to indicate start and end of the month as function parameters -> it needs to be Period type. Unfortunately line items with Period type can only be: Week, Month, Quarter, Half-Year or Year (no option to select Day).

As a side comment: if we directly point out TIMESUM to a fixed day from an internal Time list (ie.: Time.'19 Jul 01') TIMESUM is working just fine -> indicating that all it needs to work dynamically is a line item with Day formatted period.

It’s not easy to make this TIMESUM to calculate based on dynamic (not hardcoded) period, or to set the format of a line item to day period, if it is blocked.

There is a non-sustainable workaround currently in use:

We can set periods to Week, then copy the format to any text editor, which will look something like this:

{"periodType":{"entityIndex":2,"entityId":"WEEK","entityLabel":"Week","entityGuid":null},"dataType":"TIME_ENTITY"}

Then we can manually update WEEK and make it DAY as follows :

{"periodType":{"entityIndex":2,"entityId":"DAY","entityLabel":"Day","entityGuid":null},"dataType":"TIME_ENTITY"}

Now we can PASTE this line as a format and can use TIMESUM with Day Period format line items as parameters.

This workaround is not formally supported by Anaplan and encourages using backdoors in corporate supported software. Due to lack of support it holds the risk it will stop working at any point of time (e.g.: After Platform Update) or possibly causing some issues with ALM. Therefore, this solution is not recommended to be used on the production models.

The idea is to formally start supporting this solution and allow DAY being selected as a period from the Format menu, or better, DATE being an acceptable parameter for TIMESUM. Alternatively give modelers any other option to easily aggregate from DAY to MONTHS while using WEEK as Anaplan Time.