Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

24.1. Presenting Budget Information

This section delves into the common analysis and reporting techniques to present budget information in an easily readable format. It is not just important for your Analysis Services users to understand the data, but to understand it correctly. Please note, in this section we define fiscal year from July to June; this may be different for your business.

A very readable resource on presenting budget information is Larry Melillo's help and how-to article "Summarize financial data for senior management" (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HA011999971033.aspx). The article summarizes the various components that are important for reporting on budget information. Ultimately, that will be defined by your business requirements. But there are forms of analysis that are important so you can get a complete big picture of your financial situation.

24.1.1. Date Comparative Analysis

Although this is common for most if not all data warehousing scenarios, understanding what is happening by date is the most common and important aspect of financial reporting. Throughout this book, there are various MDX queries that will query a cube by date. Though that is relatively straightforward, let's review two common date functions: ParallelPeriod and PeriodsToDate. (ParallelPeriod is discussed further in Chapter 3.)

There are MDX functions like YTD, QTD, and MTD that are shortcuts to the PeriodsToDate function. For details on the respective functions, you can also ...