Defining Reporting Dimensions
Multitude of these legal and operational structures clubbed with accounting and reporting needs give rise to many reporting dimensions at which the organization may want to track or report its operational metrics and financial results. This is where business dimensions play a vital role.
Multitude of these legal and operational structures clubbed with accounting and reporting needs give rise to many reporting dimensions at which the organization may want to track or report its operational metrics and financial results. This is where business dimensions play a vital role.
Business Dimensions:
A dimension reflects the attributes of a business, such as legal structure, management structure, departments and projects. Dimensions are used to help capture and analyze underlying data and when used with reporting provides an effective tool to break down key components of business to help make better business decisions. Business dimensions describe the business-specific objects within the model, such as products, customers, regions, employees, and so on.
Why we need business dimensions:
In any typical entity, accounting process starts with recording of a transaction that has a financial implication on a voucher and it culminates with the preparation of final books of accounts. However this simple process gains complexity when the size of the organization and diversity of its environment increases. For example: Global companies regularly distribute goods from a central site to customers located in different countries or regions. Before shipping lo a customer, goods may be processed through a separate operating unit or subsidiary in the country of sales origin. A complex sequence of coupled accounting records is needed because these transactions impact multiple organizations and legal entities, and most governments require a financial record for transactions conducted between legal entities. Management need to contemplate these business dimensions properly for decision-making and enhancing the achievement of the competitive advantage and control over the operations of the enterprise.
- There exist various types of entities or business units which are part of the same global group.
- These units may represent countries, locations, businesses, functions, projects, cost centers, segments etc.
- These units may have different reporting needs.
- These units may be responsible for their own profit and loss.
- They might be holding their own Fixed Assets.
- They might be concerned with their own markets where their products are sold.
- They might be constituted as separate legal entities over multiple layers of ownership with their peculiar independent local statutory reporting needs.
- Subsidiaries and branches operating as individual entities need to be consolidated with the group financials.
Examples of different dimensions are:
- Legal Entity: Financial results and trial balance at each legal entity level
- Division/Department: Financial results and trial balance at each division or department
- Product Line: Operating margins for each product line
- Geography: Annual Growth for each geography in which a company operates
- Project: Cost and profitability for each project undertaken by business
- Cost Center: Costs accumulated and allocated through each cost center
- Accounts: Total fixed assets owned by the legal entity, accounted under land and building, furniture and fixtures and other accounts
- Functional Area: Total cost attributable to each function like finance, marketing etc.
These dimensions further have parent child relationships within themselves and other corporate relationships (known as Business Hierarchies) with other dimensions. Corporate relationships are the links between various dimensions like parent companies, subsidiaries, headquarters, branches, functions, product lines, cost centers etc. A dimension may consists of one or more hierarchies that can contain several levels.
Related Links
You May Also Like
-
Reversing Journals are special journals that are automatically reversed after a specified date. A reversing entry is a journal entry to “undo” an adjusting entry. When you create a reversing journal entry it nullifies the accounting impact of the original entry. Reversing entries make it easier to record subsequent transactions by eliminating the need for certain compound entries. See an example of reversing journal entry!
-
GL - Understanding Chart of Accounts
A chart of accounts (COA) is a list of the accounts used by a business entity to record and categorize financial transactions. COA has transitioned from the legacy accounts, capturing just the natural account, to modern-day multidimensional COA structures capturing all accounting dimensions pertaining to underlying data enabling a granular level of reporting. Learn more about the role of COA in modern accounting systems.
-
Multitude of these legal and operational structures clubbed with accounting and reporting needs give rise to many reporting dimensions at which the organization may want to track or report its operational metrics and financial results. This is where business dimensions play a vital role.
-
GL - Journal Posting and Balances
In this tutorial, we will explain what we mean by the posting process and what are the major differences between the posting process in the manual accounting system compared to the automated accounting systems and ERPs. This article also explains how posting also happens in subsidiary ledgers and subsequently that information is again posted to the general ledger.
-
Shared Services is the centralization of service offering at one part of an organization or group sharing funding and resourcing. The providing department effectively becomes an internal service provider. The key is the idea of 'sharing' within an organization or group.
-
In this article we will help you understand the double-entry accounting system and state the accounting equation and define each element of the equation. Then we will describe and illustrate how business transactions can be recorded in terms of the resulting change in the elements of the accounting equation.
-
Understand what we mean by GAAP to STAT adjustments. This article discusses the different standards that are used for multiple representations of the financial results for global organizations. Understand the meaning of US GAAP, Local GAAP, STAT, IFRS, and STAT. Finally, understand why accounting differences arise and how they are adjusted for different financial representations.
-
Functional Organizational Structures
A functional organizational structure is a structure that consists of activities such as coordination, supervision and task allocation. The organizational structure determines how the organization performs or operates. The term organizational structure refers to how the people in an organization are grouped and to whom they report.
-
Funds contributed by owners in any business are different from all other types of funds. Equity is the residual value of the business enterprise that belongs to the owners or shareholders. The funds contributed by outsiders other than owners that are payable to them in the future. Liabilities are generally classified as Short Term (Current) and Long Term Liabilities. Current liabilities are debts payable within one year.
-
Learn the typical accounting cycle that takes place in an automated accounting system. We will understand the perquisites for commencing the accounting cycle and the series of steps required to record transactions and convert them into financial reports. This accounting cycle is the standard repetitive process that is undertaken to record and report accounting.
