Planual Explained - Day 9

"Rule 2.01-06": Article 2, Chapter 1, and Rule 6 – “Avoid using Subsidiary Views”. Subsidiary views are difficult to work with and audit. Try and minimize their use especially for calculation modules; create groups of calculation modules instead with like dimensionality”. It goes against Auditable element of PLANS if you wish to use Subsidiary views

Definition of Subsidiary View: A subsidiary view is a line item that contains different dimensions from the module in which it resides. I call it as a “Module within a Module”

Here is how it was done in Pre Planual Era: We used to create a lot of Subsidiary views within a module. Either by changing the dimensionality of each line item or using “Start of the section” option.

Also you can read here How “Start of the Section” has gone obsolete because of PLANS. My Article titled How to Use Below Functionalities Link

What is wrong with this method? Subsidiary views do not have a large impact on performance, but they can be hard to identify and difficult to locate when working in a model hence not complying with the Auditable element of PLANS

Here is how it should be done in Planual Way: Create modules of similar dimension line items and avoid creating subsidiary views. Watch this short video to understand more Subsidiary Views - Anaplan Community

Exceptions: There are 5 exceptions that have been given by Planual where you can use Subsidiary views and here is the detailed explanation about all these exceptions

2.01-06a Display on Dashboards for analysis or filtering – Sometimes, to enhance the end user experience, attributes are needed to be shown on dashboards.  Let’s say we have a module with two dimensions Account and Employees where calculation happen for yearly costs of the employees. Users want to have an additional column on the dashboard which will display origin country of an employee. Since account dimension doesn’t need to be added to the line item this calls for subsidiary view in the module. In below snip it displays how users will be able to filter or do some analysis on added attribute

2.01-06b Ratio Formulae - Numeric values for ratios need to be in the same module and are unlikely to need the full dimensionality. Sometimes when there is a need to use weighted average at the summary levels we introduce the concept of “Ratio” in Summary settings. Anaplan will not allow you take Numerator and Denominator from any other module hence there may be a need to have subsidiary views in current module. In below screenshot both Numerator line item and Weight line item are part of current module.

2.01-06c Synchronization for some dashboards - If you have dashboards that need to synchronize from a module, sometimes a                specific line item is needed

2.01-06d Line items needed for sorting – Sometimes to facilitate a sort, the line items don’t need the full module dimensionality. Let’s say users need an ability to sort the employees based on the country attribute. They will be able to do so by sorting on country attribute.

2.01-06e Reporting or Export modules - To utilize filtering in reports or to provide attributes for exports, you may need to have line items for the non-dimensional attributes. Ensure these are set as subsidiary views to minimize the calculations