Usage Note 21091: SASĀ® Financial Management release 4.4 modeling formula and driver formula guidelines
When using SAS Financial Management software, the following information
should be considered when determining whether to use modeling formulas
or driver formulas.
The most important decision for a planning implementation is to decide
which members should be Driver formulas and which should be Modeling
formulas. In general, Driver formulas are recommended since queries for
summary reports do not expand the cube space and less memory will be
required to satisfy the query.
Drivers are not recommended in cases requiring dynamic results where
expression inputs change independently or where values are loaded in via
data integration and results are expected immediately. These scenarios require you
to invoke the 'Run Driver Formulas for this Formset' action. In such cases,
Modeling Formulas are recommended.
Scenario 1: Two inputs are necessary to calculate a resulting value.
These expression inputs are on different form sets. To illustrate, a
customer wants to set prices and then establish the units that could be
sold at the set prices to get total projected revenue. The prices should
be collected first and not changed. However, if prices need to be
changed, then all revenue numbers will need to be recalculated by
invoking the 'Run Driver Formulas for this Formset' action.
Scenario 2: Data is loaded into SAS Financial Management and a report
is generated. A typical example is when initial forecast numbers are
generated, data is loaded, and then initial flash reports are generated.
All Driver formulas will need to be calculated against the cube space
by invoking the 'Run Driver Formulas for this Formset' action in order to
store all the initial results.
Modeling formulas provide greater flexibility but should not be used when
the model size is large and cannot be "scoped down" significantly. A
significant contributor is the IF()/NESTIF() function. The new
'multiple expressions per member' function in SAS Financial Management release
4.4 replaces most IF()/NESTIF() functions of the type
IF(CURRENT(dim)='member'). IF()/NESTIF() functions used to test a value
in the cube, such as IF(ACCOUNT("P_TYPE")=1, cannot be replaced by
multiple expressions per member.
In summary, Driver formulas should be used in the classic budget
scenarios where customers gather data in stages and do not change values
collected in the previous stages. Modeling formulas are recommended
when the customer needs to develop a model of their business to quickly
evaluate their strategy. Utilizing Driver formulas makes the model less
dynamic and Modeling formulas limit the size of the workable model.
Operating System and Release Information
SAS System | SAS Financial Management | AIX | 4.4 | | 9.1 TS1M3 | |
64-bit Enabled AIX | 4.4 | | 9.1 TS1M3 | |
Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server | 4.4 | | 9.1 TS1M3 | |
Microsoft Windows 2000 Datacenter Server | 4.4 | | 9.1 TS1M3 | |
Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional | 4.4 | | 9.1 TS1M3 | |
Microsoft Windows 2000 Server | 4.4 | | 9.1 TS1M3 | |
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition | 4.4 | | 9.1 TS1M3 | |
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition | 4.4 | | 9.1 TS1M3 | |
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition | 4.4 | | 9.1 TS1M3 | |
Microsoft Windows XP Professional | 4.4 | | 9.1 TS1M3 | |
*
For software releases that are not yet generally available, the Fixed
Release is the software release in which the problem is planned to be
fixed.
Type: | Usage Note |
Priority: | medium |
Date Modified: | 2010-06-17 14:07:20 |
Date Created: | 2007-10-05 10:01:11 |