Perspectives

Perspectives are virtual views that show combinations of hierarchies and dimensions within complex data cubes. Perspectives help identify relevant data for your analysis context.

Benefits of perspectives

Identifying meaningful hierarchy combinations in large, multi-dimensional cubes with alternate hierarchies can be difficult.

Perspectives organize hierarchies into logical combinations and present them as virtual views or as cubes in the API and to users.

You can specify various default elements in a perspective or hide a dimension. This approach simplifies the user experience and ensures that reports and analyses are contextually relevant.

Perspectives in Financial Reporting

Perspectives define specific data areas for analysis in financial reports. You can configure different perspectives for different purposes to prevent showing or selecting structures and business objects that are not relevant.

When the Financial Reporting is used and no perspective is set manually, a default perspective is automatically published by Business Modeling based on configured business objects. Only those objects are included.

When the C-Suite option is used, an enterprise perspective is automatically generated unless you configure it manually.

You can define default elements for a business object, but you cannot hide specific elements. For example, you can set a default element, such as America, for the Regions business object, but you cannot hide other region elements, such as Europe.

Using perspectives

Customers use perspectives to exclude business objects that are not relevant to daily analysis. Excluded business objects are not displayed.

A customer can retrieve data from multiple source systems. Each source system can define information differently. For example, source system A includes financial dimensions such as regions and a profit center.Source system B does not include those details.

Because business objects from source systems can differ in the definition, perspectives show appropriate options for each context.

These are examples of daily use:

  • Entities can operate with different financial or fiscal calendars.
  • Different entities can use different sets of business objects.
  • You can exclude specific business and technical objects that are not relevant for analysis.
  • You can set different default structures for business objects. For example, for an account structure, an entity uses the IFRS account group and another entity uses the US GAAP account group. Each entity considers its corresponding account structure as the default selection.
Note: Define a separate perspective for each entity that uses a fiscal year that is not a regular calendar. If multiple entities share the same fiscal calendar, such as April–March, you can use one perspective for those entities. If other entities use a different fiscal calendar, such as August–July, create a separate perspective for those entities. Create a separate perspective for each unique fiscal calendar.