Looking for Best Practice in combining text parameters and monthly amounts

Here's another idea. Still not the best but it gets everything on the same row.

As @nathan_rudman suggests you can remove the calendar and you can denormalize the sales forecasts and create a line item for each month. I set it up so there's no hardcoding - it's based on whatever is the first month of the calendar. here's the grid and blueprint. I did the first four months. The only other way I can honestly think to get this aligned is to export to Excel using the free Anaplan Add-In. Well, hope this is closer to a solution for you.

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This is going to be fun! Now, if I understand you correctly,

There is a module that is dimensioned by event and time (months). this contains the forecast.
You also have a system module that only uses event but has a lot of details about the event.
You want to see the details and the sales forecast in the same grid.

Here's a possible idea. See if this is close to what you wanted.

In the grid we see the forecast and the details of the event only in first month. You can also selectively choose which properties you want to see. I picked the first two.

Your blueprint is rather simple: Just look up the properties from your system module.

Use DCA to only see properties on the first month. We don't want to clutter up the grid.

Anyway, just one idea. What do you think?

Hi @JaredDolich thanks for the reply!

Yes, that's exactly the issue! What you proposed is similar to the solution 2 I added, but indeed I didn't think about using the DCA for making it look cleaner, nice one! Still takes up quite a lot of "unnecessary" space I guess though, right? My models today have 4-5 years of data, plus since these are text line items, they generally take up more space I think. Does DCA save space when data is hidden?
The biggest issue is that end users would prefer to look at things side by side. So in your example, the line items would be pivoted to the columns together with the months. Then the trick is to have a filter that shows only month one for the text line items and all months for forecast amount line item. Generally I had some filter applied that did not work well, and we ended up having to hide/show some columns and it always got ruined when we switched years in the model.
Do you have any suggestions on how to make a good filter for that?

Attaching a draft of how it would look like.

Two ideas I was toying with was the use of a Line Item Subset to get it to pivot like a list. Another was to create a fake calendar, then we can pivot the line items with the time hierarchy.

By the way, if you use New UX you no longer have to use a numbered list to create list items. You can use a form instead.

I'll give it some more thought. We'll get a good solution here.

Thanks Jared! I'll play around with these ideas as well and try to make something work!

nathan_rudman

you should remove the time dimension from the property line items, unless it s a very small module

Thanks Nathan, indeed this saves some space!

Here's another idea. Still not the best but it gets everything on the same row.

Thanks Jared! Indeed this one is the better looking one, although it requires more maintenance if they need more than one year of data (although maybe we can do Current year then then CY+1, CY+2 etc and reference to the time settings so it's always updated).
I'll definitely suggest this to my users and see what they will prefer. Really appreciate all your suggestions! Gave me lots of food for thought.