Hello!
There's a situation where I've seen in many models and already there in the two companies I've worked with Anaplan.
I've also seen several solutions, none of them being great. I'm looking to the community to see if anyone has a better idea or if there's already a Best Practice available for this. I tried looking for it, but there are several ways to phrase it, so hard to pin point.
The situation is the following:
We often use number lists so that users can create things like, say, Business Events. In this example, they would create a new Business Event impacting their forecast, every time they have one. Generally we make one model that serves as a "form" where they give more information about it (such as a name, who created it, who approved it, which part of the org it affects, comments section, etc). So that would be a module with text or list selection line items for filling out the details. Then we publish a different module where they would fill in the monthly amounts of impact for that specific Business Event, and those are the numbers that would be going to the forecast at the end of the day.
Well, users usually also want to have all those infos together in an overview report. Meaning they would have the details, followed by the monthly amounts on the same table.
I'm looking for the best solution for this type of request.
So far I've seen / done the following two options:
1. Create a list with the parameters you want to show and the months in sequence (then have actions to update the months on that list); create a module with a number line item to collect the amounts to the month list items, and then another line item formatted as text that will collect the text from the parameters module for non-month list items, and looks up the values collected before for the month list items. Looks bad since the numbers are made into text, so no formatting. And also limited formatting options since it's all in one line item (no different formatting and no different column size settings possible). Not such a big deal to maintain after it's there since the actions take care of keeping the right months on the list.
2. Create a module with the parameters as line items, but also where the time dimension is applicable. Then an additional line item for the Amount. Have the parameters text info show in every month, and set up summary so that it shows the same text on "all periods" field. Pivot so that the columns show first lines items, and then time periods below. Create a filter that will show only "all periods" for the parameter-related line items, and show all months for the Amount line item. From my experience, this was always bugging when there was a change in the time scale, the filters would not work properly (maybe it was done wrong also, not sure). And takes up a lot of useless space since you need the text line items combined with time dimension.
Hope I made myself clear, but let me know if it's not and I can try to rephrase it. Looking forward to see if anyone can share any good ideas about this situation which comes around so often!
Thanks, Lis