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.

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