Dynamics 365 Business Central: Sales Forecast by a New Dimension

Dynamics 365 Business Central: Sales Forecast by a New Dimension

We're going to keep going on sales forecasting, this time around we're going to add a dimension. 

Right now, we have basically items as lines and we have period across, so we got items coming here and then you could be January, February, March, April across. We were able to do customer group which is medium or small and large, that was in the system already, in the demo system. What if he wanted to create your own dimension, with your own values?  

You can create a new dimension you just I'm going to show you how to do it in the screens here and we're creating a new dimension which is going to be a shortcut dimension. there are two terms in the system there's shortcut and global. the global ones are already there, and they are they're always available in the sales forecast and there's only two of those and they've been set in the demo system one of them is impartment. I think the other one is the customer group. 

The shortcut dimensions we can create as many of those as we like and we're going to create a new one in the system in the screen share, you'll see how this works.  This one is going to be called region and the regions in there are going to be Southwest, southeast, Northwest and northeast, and this is brand new. You could come up with whatever categorization you like, name it whatever you like, put in the values that you like for that categorization and budget for that inside the sales budget. The system will track it if you log it and we do have videos on dimensions although they are in 2018 NAV not in BC and we'll make the BC one soon. But if you want to check on the 2018 one, I recommend you do that. 

We do the same thing as before but we're just going to have this three-dimensional space here so imagine we're now in three dimensions. We have on this angle here Southwest, southeast, Northwest and northeast. We're picking an item for a time and then for each one of the regions we put in a value, and that is going to be the sales forecast for coffee mug January Southwest, coffee mug January southeast etc. 

You can create as many dimensions as you like, so again, we go into this fourth dimension, fifth dimension etc. I mean we could have another dimension here like item group and that could be coffee and something else, furniture and so. We would be then budgeting for a particular item, particular time, particular region and particularly group. Easy to get lost in these, but gives unlimited flexibility so let's look at how that works in Business Central. 

Let's take a look at dimensions, so I'm going to go right in here type in dimensions and I get dimensions up, I'm going to go ahead and create a new one and it's going to be called region, and in the region code here we're going to go ahead and see a dimension values there we go, now we can add in the dimension so I'm going to add in four regions. It's going to be the Northeast and then northwest, southeast and southwest. We are selling in the US and we care about the breaking up basically the US by four regions, so it's exactly how easy it is to create your attribute that's going to categorize or split up your GL by these values, so it could be whatever you want. In this case its region. 

So, let's go ahead and close this out, now go into sales budget and I'm going to create a new one so I'm going to call it 2019 sales and just R for region, sales by region okay and in here, I have to specify my new dimension. There is something called the two primary dimensions and then there are extra dimensions basically and the region is an extra dimension it's not one of the primary dimensions and that's why we need to add that in here, the two primary ones or global dimensions that's what they're called, are always included, so you don't have to add them in here. 

Any extra dimensions that you put in there or shortcut dimensions the system calls it you have to add, so I'm going to add region since that's a shortcut dimension, then I go in here and just added budget and I get my matrix again, and it is with the filter of a 101 19 to 25, okay that's fine. What I want to do is use the third dimension just like we did before, so I'm only going to look at January 101 19200 131 19 and then I'm going to change the columns to show region and there it come.  

Now I have this four regions, so I can go ahead and say I'm going to sell 500 northeast, 500 Northwest, 1000 southeast and 750 in the southwest, so these coffee mugs are doing really well in the south and I can do the same thing for the packaged coffee beans, obviously 750, 1500 hundred 2000. If I now take a look at it by period again, it sums it up. Now I have budgeted by region and that's my third dimension. It's a new dimension you can see here, region filter, it's a new dimension that I just created. Created the name, created the values and if you have something that you purchase it by doesn't matter what it is you can go in Business Central, add it as a dimension, add the values and budget by it, and on top of that you can do so much more with dimensions. 

I do have a lot of videos with NAV 2016 17 18 on dimensions and I'm probably going to redo them for Business Central, because the Business Central people are probably not looking at those and for the NAV people, well you're just going to see how it works in business central as well.