This is part of the SAP Lumira Discovery blog series.

According to Wikipedia, A fiscal year (financial year or budget year) is the period used by governments for accounting and budget purposes, which vary between countries. It is also used for financial reporting by business and other organizations.

SAP Lumira Discovery, by default, supports only a calendar year (Start : Jan 1st , End : Dec 31st). We would need to leverage the Calculation function to build a custom dimension for creating a Fiscal year (Example : Start : Apr 1st , End : Mar 31st). The basic requirements for performing this calculation is,

– A date field against which you would want to compare
– A hierarchy that can be used for trend analysis
– Year() function

– Month() function

– if-then-else statement

We can then calculate the Fiscal Year custom dimension using the formula below,

We can then extend the same concept to building Fiscal Quarter and Month calculations as shown below,

Fiscal Year : Level 1

if Month({Date}) < 4 then Year({Date}) - 1 else Year({Date})

Fiscal Quarter : Level 2

if Month({Date}) > 3 and Month({Date}) <= 6 then 1 else if Month({Date}) >= 7 and Month({Date})<=9 then 2 else if Month({Date}) >=10 and Month({Date}) <= 12 then 3 else 4

Fiscal Month : Level 3

if Month({Date}) < 4 then Month({Date}) + 9 else Month({Date}) – 3

An important approach would be to create custom dimensions first and then develop a custom hierarchy using these dimensions at different levels. We can even build one more level indicating the names of the month. Below, we see the trend analysis based on a fiscal calendar even though we have filtered to the calendar year 2011.

This process would work only for imported data due to the data preparation steps involved. If the Fiscal period definition is available in the source itself, we can even leverage them using a live SAP BW connection as shown below.

More details on the individual features can be found by clicking on the hyperlinks/title.

This information is based on the current product and roadmap and is bound to change.

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