Overview
BI4Cloud provides GL reporting for divisions within a company or consolidated over several companies to deliver useful whole of company or entity comparison information. Within a company divisional analysis is often achieved using Categories as the divisions and posting and reporting by Category.
While these reports are useful they only show the financial information and don't provide a per unit analysis therefore comparing efficiencies of divisions is compromised. As an example a real estate business could have two leasehold properties one a shopping mall and one office accomodation and they may be vastly different in size so simple financial reporting does provide useful comparison.
A more functional comparison for a real estate agent would be to show Yield per Square Metre (Yield/SQM).
BI4Cloud provides features to setup Non Financial KPIs and User Calculation KPIs. Using these KPIs a user can define one or more Metric to be used in GL reports. Once defined the Metric can be added to GL Profit & Loss reports as an additional column.
How do I create a user defined Metric ?
- Create a Non-Financial KPI that contains the non-financial data to be used to calculate the metric
- Create a User Calculation that uses the Financial and Non-Financial information to determine the metric values
- Refresh KPI to Calculate the metric
- Run your reports.
We strongly recommend you use Chrome Web browser when using the KPI editing forms because we have optimised this program for use in Chrome.
Detail steps to create a user defined Metric
1. In the Admin console select the Cool Stuff icon
2. Select the KPIs option from the menu list
- or -
If already in Cool Stuff just select the KPIs from the pull-down menu
3. The KPI features are displayed. We are only interested in Non Financial KPI, User Calculation and View KPI tabs when defining User Metrics
Create Non-Financial KPI
- Enter a KPI name
- Use a name which helps you relate to the Category used within GL. e.g. We define a non financial KPI "Net Leasable Area (NLA) for NSW" and give it a name NSW_NLA and this is associated with GL Category NSW
- Select or Create a KPI Group
- Thus is used in KPI display screens - stage 2
- Is this a Monthly value or Fixed value ?
- Is this value a Balance or a Movement ?
- Enter one value in the first Month if this is a Fixed value or fill out each month for Monthly values
- Check the "Use in GL reports" box
- Select the GL Category that this non financial KPI relates to
- Select or Create a Calculation Group
- A Calculation Group is a way to group non-financial KPIs to allow easier calculations.
- In our example we have several non financial KPIs specifying Net_Leasable_Area (NLA) in Square Metres (SQM) for GL Categories NSW, VIC, QLD.
- So NSW Yield is Yield/SQM GL_Cat NSW = Actual GL_Cat NSW / NLA GL_Cat NSW
- and VIC Yield is Yield/SQM GL_Cat VIC = Actual GL_Cat VIC / NLA GL_Cat VIC
- That is just too tedious having to specify a formulae for each category so instead we put these into a Calculation Group "Net_Leasable_Area" and simply specify the calculation
- Yield/SQM = Actual / Net_Leasable_Area
- When you finish press the Save button
To Navigate through the Non-Financial KPIs use the Left and Right arrow buttons, to Add a KPI use the Plus button and the Delete a KPI use the X button
Create a Calculated KPI
- Click the Tab "Calculated KPI"
- Enter a name for the Calculated KPI
- Our example use Yield/SQM as the name. Note the name is used as the metric heading in the GL Reports
- Enter a description of the Calculated KPI
- Select or Create a KPI Group to keep the KPI in
- This is only used for presentation purposes
- In the KPI or User Report Field choose User Report Field. Selecting User Report Field makes the calculation available in the GL reports
- For the Metric # ( Metric number ) choose a value from 1, 2 or 3 as they are three Metric available in GL.
- Enter the calculation by
- selecting Actuals from the pulldown list
- adding this calculation box with the [ Add ] button
- pressing + / * - buttons for the operation
- selecting Net_Leasable Area
- If you make an error use Clear button and start again
- Be sure to select Metric as the Usage type. This makes the calculation available in the GL
- When you finish press the Save button
Your completed for should look like this
Calculating KPI and Metrics
- Click the Tab "View KPI" and press the Refresh KPI button.
- In this limited release only the calculation is performed and no KPIs are displayed.
- The calculation process can take a minute or two to complete.
View your Metric in GL reports
- Go to the reports section of BI4Cloud
- Select and run the GL Profit and Loss report
- To select the new Metric choose the +/- Cols toolbar and you will see the following
- Currently there is a glitch on first selection where it's show the internal variable name and not the Metric name. Just select by Metric #
Once you select the Metric then click Done to run the report and the Metric will be displayed.
You can save these reports as favourites as you would any other report.
Warnings
1. On the first time you select the Metric Name in GL reporting using +/- Cols the names displayed are programmer gibberish. You need to choose by metric number. The subsequent +/- Cols displays the correct names.
2. When defining non-financial KPIs if you choose Monthly values then you must enter a value for each month. These values are for the Current and Future Financial Years and if you have previous year's data there is currently no way to enter a non financial KPI for prior years. The values will be indeterminate e.g. #1.IND #1.INF. The work around is to use Fixed value and enter the value in period 1
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