Drill-down into summarized transaction detail from a bottom-level actuals field

Description

Drill-down functionality in Corporate Performance Management (CPM) software allows users to click on a summarized data field and access the underlying transaction details. When referencing “bottom-level” this means that the user is at the lowest level in the dimension hierarchy when drilling into the field.

Example Use Case

Scenario: A user would like to drill into transaction detail for a cell in a previous time period. In Excel they are unable to do so without digging through an entire sheet of transactions, or navigating their ledger.

Solution: With granular drill-down capabilities, the user can get down to very specific detail. Version / Department / Location / Product / Account / Month, right click on the cell and view only those transactions. They've just saved hours of labor.

Considerations

Being able to drill at such a granular level will save your team a lot of time, that is not in doubt. What you should be wary of is a more summarized drill down that takes too many steps. Some tools will, in the CPM application, show transactions in a cell with very little detail. For example, that may not bring over all the accounting system segments with the transaction, leaving you with “$100, Starbucks”. That is almost never helpful. Make sure you see transactions with meaningful information in the demo.

Some tools will then make you drill again back into a source system such as a ledger or expense tool to see the transactions there. In that case, your users will need a license for both the CPM tool and the source system which is not always practical.

The best-case scenario in the case of granular drill down is to see the transactions with all associated tags/accounting segments and descriptions in the cell of your choice, and see that the sum of those transactions actually adds up to the sum of the cell. If it doesn't (some systems don't) then nobody will trust the data.

Questions to Ask a Vendor

• Transaction Detail: What transactional information will appear when we drill into the cell? Can we change that?
• Source Systems: Are we able to drill back into the source system? How will that work?
• Math: Will the values of the transactions sum up to the value shown in the cell? If not, why not?