Skip to main content

Notifications

Announcements

No record found.

News and Announcements icon
Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Business Central forum / Example for using Dime...
Business Central forum
Suggested answer

Example for using Dimensions in business

(0) ShareShare
ReportReport
Posted on by Hrvoje Kusulja 370

Hello,

I fully understand what Dimensions are and how they work.

What I will need, good example use-cases for this. I understand this is a more business-oriented question, depending on industry, business model / proces and business needs (what data/information/reports do they need so they can make decisions).

However, I also believe here is good BC community using Dimension heavy in production and if you can share some use good (business) case examples.

How many dimensions? Which of them are global? Do you set them as default to customers, or items, or manually entry? Do you use them for purchase, and sales and manual G/L entries etc.

Of course, I expect to use them for reporting using Power BI and analysis of data to make business decisions.

So, from your experience, let's look at several industries and business cases and when it is good practice and suggested to use dimensions, how/when they are used.

I am interested in the industry of an IT company (or could be telco business), which also resells the hardware, the software, but also provides its own services from IT experts as work hours. Please provide some guidance and experience of which dimension you will create, and where you will put the default use etc.

Categories:
Other
Purchasing
Sales
  • Suggested answer
    Dallefeld Profile Picture
    Dallefeld 11,423 User Group Leader on at
    RE: Example for using Dimensions in business

    You’re last post made me smile!!

  • Hrvoje Kusulja Profile Picture
    Hrvoje Kusulja 370 on at
    RE: Example for using Dimensions in business

    You can not forget something that you do not know. Thank you for this very valuable info about Source Type and Source No. field on G/L entries..

  • Suggested answer
    Dallefeld Profile Picture
    Dallefeld 11,423 User Group Leader on at
    RE: Example for using Dimensions in business

    Don't forget that you have the Source Type and Source No fields on general ledger entries that will show Customer/Vendor and the associated number that generated the transaction.

  • Suggested answer
    MahGah Profile Picture
    MahGah 15,419 on at
    RE: Example for using Dimensions in business

    Try table 352 (Default Dimension) then you see numbers (customer / vendor), type (customer / vendor) and dimension or dimension value. You also have dimension in G/L. then you can use dimension as a key to link them together.  

  • Hrvoje Kusulja Profile Picture
    Hrvoje Kusulja 370 on at
    RE: Example for using Dimensions in business

    It is no issue about creating Page API on internal Extension, and then using in Power BI to get and link information.

    My question is, which BC tables? :/, since i do not see how the g/l entry is connected to customer entry :/

  • Suggested answer
    MahGah Profile Picture
    MahGah 15,419 on at
    RE: Example for using Dimensions in business

    We created custom API since it was much easier then linking and doing it in Power BI. But you need to publish a few pages from BC that I cannot remember now.  But you can create custom API then pull all the data you need to create a link then publish that for Power BI 

    Look into  https://www.hougaard.com/designer/ 

  • Hrvoje Kusulja Profile Picture
    Hrvoje Kusulja 370 on at
    RE: Example for using Dimensions in business

    Tx for the info. Yes, COGS is used.

    If I create "customer group" dimension and segment the customers, I will have info, but only on a group level/category. Which is ok also for Power BI. But what is missing when using dimension the way to see all traffic for particular customer and not just the group. But ok, thank you for the hint.

    How do you connect in Power BI tables from specific customer with G/L entires at the end?

  • Suggested answer
    MahGah Profile Picture
    MahGah 15,419 on at
    RE: Example for using Dimensions in business

    I wonder which G/L account you have in mind.

    For example in Account Payable you can see Vendor No. In Account receivable you can see customer No.  But if you work with COGS and Revenue then yes you cannot find customer or vendor info there directly. That is a use of dimension

    In my company we have the same setup, then in Power BI for drill down we pulled all customers and their dimension in table in BI then linked here and hence we can see those details in drill down.

  • Hrvoje Kusulja Profile Picture
    Hrvoje Kusulja 370 on at
    RE: Example for using Dimensions in business

    my goal is to use general ledger entries, not customer or vendor ledger entries. Maybe this is the way that simply BC works, and is not possible on G/l Account level get the information about particular customer and/or vendor. But it would be very usefull.

    When using Power BI, all categories are also stored in BC so it is all refreshed at the same time.

    In your example case, it is very hard to do analysis inside detailed and more specific end-customer or vendor, since you use dimension but based on group of customers. :/

  • Suggested answer
    MahGah Profile Picture
    MahGah 15,419 on at
    RE: Example for using Dimensions in business

    Hi

    You can report and use dimension in Power BI. Also, even without dimension you can go to vendor and customer ledger entry and report for them. But if you have a group of vendor that you want to report under one category then with dimension you can have that group and then use the group in Power Bi instead of adding those vendors together. It makes your Power Bi report more dynamic since anytime new vendor added you do not need to go to your bi and add vendor to that category.

    I am not clear on this question "And if you want to filter to specific vendor or customer, it seems it is not possible, please confirm?" you can filter to any vendor from vendor ledger entry.

    Again all depends on situation and your goal. We for example have two shortcut dimensions. Customer and Vendor. Then for Vendor we have about 15 different value. For customer about 30 value.

    Then we assigned those value to each customer or vendor. And as Kim said the rest is automated.

Under review

Thank you for your reply! To ensure a great experience for everyone, your content is awaiting approval by our Community Managers. Please check back later.

Helpful resources

Quick Links

Anton Venter – Community Spotlight

Kudos to our October Community Star of the month!

Announcing Our 2024 Season 2 Super Users!

A new season of Super Users has arrived, and we are so grateful for the daily…

Dynamics 365 Community Newsletter - September 2024

Check out the latest community news

more Community News

Leaderboard

#1
André Arnaud de Calavon Profile Picture

André Arnaud de Cal... 290,564 Super User 2024 Season 2

#2
Martin Dráb Profile Picture

Martin Dráb 228,651 Most Valuable Professional

#3
nmaenpaa Profile Picture

nmaenpaa 101,148

Leaderboard

Featured topics

Product updates

Dynamics 365 release plans