It is a requirement here that PMF time is set up for our fiscal calendar which starts in September.

Following the instructions in the PMF 5 manual (p. 250), "start month" was set to September and used autogen to create the time dimension. However reports seem to still be displaying based on a calendar year (not a fiscal year). Also reports using YTD (for example analysis designer) are still filtering based on calendar year. Is there something that I am missing?

Thanks in advance.
-Seth

Hi Seth,

We use a fiscal calendar at my current client, and we loaded a custom time dimension.

Look in the Designing a Custom Time Dimension Load section of the manual for instructions on how to build the table structure.

Let me know if you have any specific issues, and I'll do what I can to help.

Cheers,

Joey

Thanks Joey,

I was hoping to avoid loading a custom time dimension unless necessary.

From the manual, it sounds like “start month” is designed to change the first month of an autogened calendar to be another month besides January – which is perfect for most fiscal calendars.

Has anyone used “start month”? Maybe I am misinterpreting the functionality.

Hi again,

I've found some time to research this, but I still don't think the autogen time dimension will work for what you are trying to do. You see, I am not convinced the start month does anything, based on this:

-Load an Autogenerated Time Dim in PMF
-Change the Start Month
-Save
-Preview the load
-Notice the "Number of values unchanged" is all the records and the "Number of new values" is zero

If the start month did any re-mapping of the time dim, you would expect it to fully replace the dim data with new values, right?

So, the only other thing that the start month might do is affect the way reports display. You have already found limitations with this, such as the Analysis designer. However, the real solution to your problem might be to modify your time ranges to do what you want, instead of the time dimension.

For example... if you are in November, and you want to "show last year" then why not make a Time Range (Manage Tab) that logically shows you last year's October to this year's August?

Alternately, build that custom time dimension!

The "Start Month" does not affect the loaders, it only affects the behavior of reports. The loaders do not recognize or 'know' January, February, etc; the loaders only know "01" through "12".

So if your fiscal calendar starts in September, the decision you need to make is how should the reports appear to the end user. Do you want month "01" on the reports to represent January or do you want month "01" to represent September? Once you make this decision, you have to insure that you enforce this rule when you load the Measures. So if you want month "01" to represent September's data, then when you load all your Measures, make certain that "01" in your source data is really September data and not January data.

So what does the the "Start Month" on the dimension loader actually do? The answer is that works together with the "Today Date" setting, which is found on the PMF Settings form under the Manage tab (this is Admin tab in earlier PMF releases). If you go to the Settings form, at the very bottom there is an option for the Today Date which reads 'Use system clock date'. This setting insures that all Time Ranges which are based on the current time period (e.g., Current Month and Next") will adjust the current period according to the Start Month. So if you set your Start Month to September, and today is April 1, then the current PMF time period is Year: 2009, Quarter: 3, Month: 09 - since April is the 9th month of the fiscal calendar starting in September. However, in all reports in this situation, month 01 will be September's data.

Note that currently the Fiscal Year is defined as the calendar year in which the fiscal year ends. So September 2009 will be Fiscal Month "01" of Fiscal Year 2010.

EricH

Thanks for the explanation Eric. We use a custom procedure to determine the current period, since we have a one week lag between now and the data. As such, I was correct that in our environment, that start date field does not do anything.

We also use a custom time dimension that remaps the calendar months to our fiscal months, which means that 2009 01 01 is the first week in February. In our case we use yyyy mm ww, in case you were wondering why I said week.

Cheers,

Joey