About the application calendar
The Gregorian calendar is widely used to schedule events. For many businesses, the Gregorian calendar presents an accounting difficulty, because it contains a varied number of business days from year to year. Because accounting principles value consistency as a means of measuring performance over time, the best way to track your financial data is to create your own application calendar. However, to be consistent and accurate, your application calendar must be created carefully.
In Planning Business Modeler, the application calendar is used to set up a concept of time periods that matches the practices that are used in your company. From an accounting standpoint, the concept of time and how it is tracked is fundamental to measuring and comparing financial progress over time. An accurate application calendar provides your past, present, and forecasted data with the context that you require for successful financial tracking and benchmarking. The application calendar is created as part of the application-creation process and is a required step.
Warning
Creating an application calendar that accurately represents your business processes is very important to the success and accuracy of your application. After you create a calendar, all aspects of your application refer to the Time dimension in one way or another. For example, your data, reports, jobs, cycles, assignments, and so on all reference the Time dimension. Make sure that the application calendar is created to accurately match your processes. You cannot modify the calendar later unless you create a new application and then repopulate the data. A necessary step in creating an application is to specify accurate start and end dates that match your business processes.
Calendar start and end dates
By using the Planning Business Modeler application calendar, you can define a custom calendar for a Planning Business Modeler application. By doing this, you can create a calendar that matches the specific patterns of your financial system. For example, you can create a calendar that starts on July 1 and ends on June 30. You can also create a more traditional calendar that starts on January 1 and ends on December 31.
Because a single application can have only one calendar, multiple applications might need multiple calendars in order to track different aspects of the business. For example, although the internal fiscal reporting calendar might end on December 31, the manufacturing division calendar might end the year on June 30. In addition, when you use a calendar with a varying year end, you have the option of adding an extra week to some years in the calendar. For example, your company might want to add an extra week one time every four years. This is a way to account for the extra days that occur at the end of the year.
Note
When Planning Business Modeler makes changes to the application calendar, it uses the locale on the client computer. Thus, users in every locale view calendar data that reflects the locale in which it was created. For example, if a calendar is created on a computer that uses a locale of Germany. Then any user of the same Planning Business Modeler application uses this calendar. If a user from a different locale makes a change to the calendar for this application, such as extending the calendar, all users see the old data in the original locale. However, new data appears in the locale of the user who made the changes.
Time frequency
A time frequency is used for grouping data. For example, weeks and months are frequently used time frequencies. In Planning Server, you can select from the predefined set of frequency types, but year, month, and day are required frequencies. Optional frequencies include half year, trimester, quarter, and week, depending on how you define the monthly periods. For example, if your months correspond with calendar months and the year always ends on the same day, the half year, quarter, and trimester frequencies are available. However, if your year end varies, the half year and trimester frequencies are not available.
Common patterns
When you create an application calendar, you can select a monthly period pattern that matches the periods that are used in your company. The following are common patterns that are used in PerformancePoint Planning:
445 pattern. Months in a year contain weeks as follows: 4 weeks, 4 weeks, 5 weeks, and then the pattern is repeated. Fixed or variable year end.
454 pattern. Months in a year contain weeks as follows: 4 weeks, 5 week, 4 weeks, and then the pattern is repeated. Fixed or variable year end.
544 pattern. Months in a year contain weeks as follows: 5 weeks, 4 weeks, 4 weeks, and then the pattern is repeated. Fixed or variable year end.
13. A year contains 13 equal periods. Fixed or variable year end.
Calendar views
When you create the application calendar or extend the calendar, you can create additional custom views of the calendar data. Calendar views can be used to display members of the Time dimension in a convenient way. For example, if your calendar includes the frequencies year, quarter, month, and day, you can create a view of the data that shows only year and month data. You can then use these views in a model.
Time hierarchies
Time hierarchies are a combination of frequencies that you can associate with models. In the Time dimension, frequencies in a view roll up into each other. For example, if your financial data is based on daily totals and you create your calendar by using day, month, and year frequencies, you can collapse days to view months in the hierarchy. If you create a view to display months, based on the same hierarchy, days are omitted, but months are displayed and can be rolled up into years.