Creating the budget dimensions

In the budget application, planners use budget reports to create budgets. Because planners have diverse business objectives, they can construct different budget reports to meet each planner's needs. For example, some planners may need to budget by project and employee with a given cost center. While others may budget by job code and project. To create your budget, you can include accounts, accounting units, account categories and employees as budget dimensions in your metadata as necessary. Budget dimensions provide information that you can use to structure budget reports in the budget application.

When you define budget dimensions in Budget Architect, you are associating the budget dimensions that are in the budget application with specific data sources in the Lawson Business Management System. When you create a budget dimension, you must define selection criteria to determine the data that you want to populate in the dimension. You can also identify dimension attributes to include additional information about the data source in the budget plan (such as person responsible for an accounting unit or variable level address).

The Budget Architect uses your budget dimension metadata to determine the information your budget application imports from your Lawson Business Management System.

Use this procedure to create budget dimensions:

  1. On Budget Architect (EB10.1), select Dimensions. Budget Dimensions (EB10.2) displays.
  2. On Budget Dimensions (EB10.2) you can define up to 12 dimensions for your budget. the Pillar application, for example, requires these three dimensions:

    • Accounts

    • Cost Centers

    • Revenue Centers

      Optional dimensions can be created using these sources:

    • Activities

    • Employees

    • Job Codes

    • Strategic Ledger Segment

    • Account Categories

    • Accounting Units

    • Accounts

    • Non-Lawson Source

      Specify a name to define each dimension for your budget.

      Note: The dimension names are used as file names for the import/export files. Do not use special characters or spaces in the dimension names. Details on changing the file names are found elsewhere in this user guide.

      See Renaming dimension report files.

  3. Assign a Dimension Source to each of your budget dimensions. This table describes the sources that you can use on the EB10.2 form:
    Dimension source Type code Description
    Accounts A General Ledger accounts, including summary and posting accounts and ancestor levels.
    Account Categories C Project Accounting account categories.
    Accounting Units U General Ledger accounting units, including posting and summary accounting units and Lawson-and user-defined accounting unit attributes.
    Activities V Project Accounting activities, including summary and posting activities and Lawson- and user-defined activity attributes.
    Employees E Lawson Human Resources employees and Lawson-defined employee attributes.
    Job Codes Lawson Human resources job codes and Lawson-defined job code attributes.
    Strategic Ledger Segment S Strategic Ledger user analysis segments, including Lawson- and user-defined attributes.
    Non-Lawson Source N Data from a non-Lawson application, such as a spreadsheet.
    Note: The dimension source that you select for the Accounts dimension should relate to the dimension sources that you select for the Cost Center and Revenue Center dimensions. For example, if you select General Ledger Accounts as the source for the Accounts dimension, then you must select Accounting Units as the source for the Cost Center and Revenue Center dimensions. If you select Account Categories as the source for the Accounts dimension, then you must select Activities as the source for the Cost Center and Revenue Center dimensions.
  4. Once the dimensions are added, you can use the Details button to further define each dimension. The Dimension Information (EB10.3) will display.