Use case: Basic allocations with  InfoFlex

This use case describes how to use the InfoFlex process to perform simple allocations between departments.

The business problem

Today organizations face growing pressure to control costs and manage financial resources strategically. A common challenge is deciding how to best manage large expenses that occur in departments (cost centers) that do not generate revenues. In order to control costs and maintain profitability, it is important to know which revenue-driving departments are consuming resources from the various cost centers at any given time.

It is time-consuming and complex for finance teams to allocate expenses from cost centers across the various departments using Excel sheets and manual calculations. Furthermore, there are very few options for spreading these expenses across departments, so organizations are often limited in their ability to assign costs appropriately in various business situations.

The solution

Using the InfoFlex process, you can easily define monthly/quarterly/annual allocations that move data from one part of the model to another. Furthermore, InfoFlex enables you to spread data using five different methods, and can accommodate multiple allocations in a single step. This use case walks through using InfoFlex to perform a single allocation.

The benefits

By using InfoFlex for allocations, you obtain the following benefits:

Time savings

Each month, you simply update the Current Month named set, and then run the process—no spreadsheets are needed.
Data accuracy and consistency

InfoFlex performs the difficult weighted-average formulas, saving you from having to enter cell formulas manually.
Better process security

You can use data security settings to restrict who can run the allocation process. Limiting data access to advanced users protects confidentiality and improves data quality.

How it's done

ABC Company is a publisher and distributor of books. The company tracks transactions using a dimension called Publishing Group, which organizes books into the following categories (members in the model):

(10-110) Art
(10-120) Entertainment
(10-130) Food and Drink
(10-140) Children
(10-150) Lifestyle
(10-000) Unspecified

ABC Company always bills travel expenses to account (61400) Travel Expenses and to account (10-000) Unspecified, in Publishing Group.

They want to allocate expenses from (61400) Travel Expenses in the account (10-000) Unspecified in Publishing Group to a target account called (61401) Allocation Target, across all five members of Publishing Group.

Open Process Manager and in the blank process group that appears, insert an InfoFlex process.
In the General tab, select the Connection and Cube for the allocations.
To specify the allocations, select the Common Dimensions tab.

You keep the selections for the dimensions whose members you want to allocate from the same source and target member(s), whereas you clear the dimensions whose members you want to allocate from a source member(s) to different target member(s). Therefore you do the following:
- Account dimension: clear the check box, because you know that you want to move travel expenses from 61400 to 61401 in the allocation.
- Version dimension: keep check box selected, because you know that the Version will be Actual (and will not change before and after the allocation); you click  and select the member Actual.
- Time dimension: keep check box selected, as there is no need to move data from one time period to another within the allocation; you click  to select the time period members.
- Publishing Group dimension: clear the check box, because you know that the Publishing Group will change before and after the allocation, (you want to allocate from (10-000) Unspecified to the five different Publishing Groups).
To specify the source for each allocation, select the Source/Target Members tab. (The dimensions whose check boxes you cleared in the previous step are enabled in this tab.) and in the Source Data section:
- For Account, click  and choose (61400) Travel Expenses.
- For Publishing Group, click  and choose (10-000) Unspecified.
To specify the target for each allocation, in the Target Members section:
- For Account, click  and choose (61401) Allocation Target.
- For Publishing Group, click  and choose these five members:
  - (10-110) Art
  - (10-120) Entertainment
  - (10-130) Food and Drink
  - (10-140) Children
  - (10-150) Lifestyle
To spread the data, select the Dimension Spread tab. In order to meet the requirement of ABC Company to spread the data from the Publishing Group's account (10-000) Unallocated to the five Publishing Group members, you do the following:
- Select the option Spread based on data in.
- For Account, select (4101) Gross Sales.
- For Version, keep the current target member.
- For Time, keep the current target member.
 Note: For the purposes of this example, the various options in the Data Transformation and Processing Options tabs are not required.
The InfoFlex definition is now complete.
Insert an Update Cube process.
In the Process Group tree, select Update Cube. The option tabs for the process appear in the main panel.
In the General tab, specify the same Connection and Cube as you did for the InfoFlex process.
Run the process.

Before making the allocations through InfoFlex, the transactional data was stored in (10-000) Unspecified in account (61401) Travel Expenses:

	Travel Expenses (+)	Sales
Unspecified	10,000
Art		30,000
Entertainment		60,000
Food and Drink		60,000
Children		100,000
Lifestyle		50,000
Total Company (+)	10,000	300,000

The goal was to allocate based on the Sales seen across the five Publishing Groups. The InfoFlex process described above results in the following data spread in account (61401) Allocation Target.

	Travel Expenses (+)	Sales	Allocation Target
Unspecified	10,000
Art		30,000	1,000
Entertainment		60,000	2,000
Food and Drink		60,000	2,000
Children		100,000	3,333
Lifestyle		50,000	1,667
Total Company (+)	10,000	300,000	10,000

Next steps

If ABC Company wants to allocate expenses each month, the process can be enhanced by using a named set to group the accounts, and by saving and naming the InfoFlex process, and then scheduling it to run automatically.