Specifying Dimensions and Attributes for G/L Accounts

If you assign dimensions to accounts, your G/L data becomes multi-dimensional. For example, not only can you drill down to detail about an account, but you can also drill across to details about the customer or the item involved in a particular A/R transaction posted to that account.

To support this functionality, predefined dimensions related to Customer, Item and Vendor information are included in the SyteLine initialized data and can be attached to an account. Each dimension has a predefined set of attributes. Your system administrator can modify or add dimensions and attributes, and set up additional joins between database tables, to meet your company's needs.

Typically, the process includes these steps:

You tell the system administrator how you want to analyze the Chart of Accounts and posted ledger transactions. Be specific about the information you need to see, including any functions or calculations.

For example, for an account related to employees, you might want to see employee-specific information. The system administrator can join the employee database table in the dimension, so that employee-related fields are made available for your reports. You do not need to see all of the fields in the employee table, so unwanted fields can be hidden. You might also want to see some fields from other tables. The number of possible joins and dimensions that are applicable to an account is unlimited; the predefined data only includes a small sample.
The system administrator finds the appropriate information in the database and builds any additional calculations based on that data, creating dimension attributes.

The system administrator then makes the attributes available to you through the Chart of Accounts Dimensions and Ledger Dimensions forms.
Use the Dimensions tab on the Chart of Accounts form to assign one or more dimensions to an account. The same dimension can be added to any or all G/L Accounts. Do one of the following:
- For Ledger object analysis, select a dimension in the Ledger Dimension drop-down list to assign it to the account.
- For Chart of Accounts object analysis, select one or more dimensions in the grid to assign them to the account. You can then click the Dimensions button to open the Chart of Accounts Dimensions form, where you can perform these actions on the listed dimension attributes:
  - View the name and description of the attribute.
  - View the underlying database schema and/or calculation used to produce the output data.
  - See if the attribute is hidden in the output and if a mask is used to display the data (for example, display a date as MM/DD/YY or DD/MM/YYYY). If you have the appropriate permissions, you can modify these options for an attribute.
  - Re-sequence the attribute display order. To do this, change the numbers in the Sequence column and click Resequence.

You can then click the Details button to open the Chart of Accounts Dimension Details form, where you can view the actual output data for the dimension and export the grid to Excel for further analysis and reporting.