NAV dimension combinations for additional accuracy (part 8 of 15)

One way to get additional accuracy out of your NAV dimensions is to assign dimension combinations. Dimension combinations are really good for two things:  1) to keep you from posting something that simply doesn’t belong where you’re putting it, and 2) to keep you from posting a combination of dimensions together that don’t belong together. Let’s go through a couple of examples.

Say that, according to your dimension strategy, you’ve designated the dimension team to go with customer master data, and the dimension edition to go with item master data. If you don’t want team to ever be allowable together with edition, set a dimension combination of blocked on the grid where the two dimensions intersect.

Another example is something we do at my company. We rely very heavily on budgeted information and budget all of our product development expenses with two dimensions assigned: team and project. Each team has their own list of assigned projects and no team should ever share a project. In order to keep ourselves from having a lot of reclassification entries, we assign a dimension combination of limited on the grid where team and project intersect. This setting allows us to further drill down and define which projects belong to which team. If we receive bad coding or even just enter a project number incorrectly, if that project number is not one on the “approved” list of project dimensions assigned to that team, we’ll get a message that lets us know we’ve made an invalid choice before we post it into our system permanently.

Keep reading this month as we continue our series, 15 Days of NAV Dimensions.