Troubleshooting Financial Report Builder

Refer to the sections below for guidance on how to resolve issues that you might encounter while configuring and using Financial Report Builder.

Combining Lenses and Dimensions

When creating a report, you must ensure your selected lenses have the following attributes. If you do not do this, the data shown in your reports will not be incorrect, but might not display as expected.

  • When adding two or more lenses that share dimensions derived from the same dataset, these dimensions must be ordered identically in these lenses to avoid errors in your report. Dimensions can differ between lenses, provided they are ordered identically.
  • The final dimension in your lenses must be identical across lenses. If you do not do this, you cannot pivot the data displayed in your report, even if pivoting is enabled in your Financial Report Builder configuration, or in the lenses held in Analytics Studio.
  • Do not repeat dimensions in a lens or lenses.

Example error scenarios arising from lens and dimension combinations are shown below:

Example Error Scenarios

Column Combination

Error
ABC DBC The ordering of columns DBC does not match the ordering of columns ABC. A correct ordering would be BCD.
ABC AB Column C is not shared across both lenses. This means that your report cannot be pivoted, even if pivot is enabled in the individual lenses in Analytics or in the table configuration.
ABC AB BAC Columns BAC do not match the ordering of columns ABC and AB. This means that your report cannot be pivoted, even if pivot is enabled in the individual lenses in Analytics or in the table configuration.

Pivoting Time Period Type Lenses

If you apply pivoting to more than one time period type lens, where these lenses have different periods with null values, then the columns displayed in your report will not be presented in chronological order.

For example, a user might select two lenses for the time period January - May.

  • Their first lens contains data for January, March, and April. All other months have null values.
  • Their second lens contains data for April, February and May. All other months have null values.

In this scenario, the column ordering for both lenses would be January, March, April, February, and May.

This because Financial Report Builder reads the first lens to create the columns displayed, and then reads the second lens to add its values in. In this case, the two lenses have different periods with null values, and are grouped accordingly:

Example Pivot Scenario

Trial Balance

January

March

April

February

May
First Lens 116 349 111 0 0
Second Lens 0 0 11 10 8

To resolve this issue, you must create a new lens to control the column ordering in your pivoted lenses. To do this, follow the steps below:

  1. Navigate to Analytics Studio.
  2. Create a new lens in the dataset used to create your pivoted lenses. This lens must contain all the time periods covered by your pivoted lenses. For example, January - May.
  3. Click Save..
  4. Enter a name for your lens.
  5. Click Save.
  6. Navigate back to your report in Financial Report Builder.
  7. Click Lightning cog icon. | Lens Configuration.
  8. Add your new lens using the steps described in Lens Configuration.
  9. Deselect the Visible checkbox next to your lens.
  10. Move your new lens to the top of the lens hierarchy, using Upward chevron.. This defines the ordering of the columns displayed in your report.
  11. Your columns are now presented in chronological order.

Lens and Calculation Naming

You cannot perform a calculation on a lens configuration row if the following conditions apply:

  • Your selected lens contains a dimension that ends in a number. For example, "Column1".
  • The alias you specify for your selected lens ends in a number. For example, "Col1".

Drilling on Lenses with Filters Applied

Drill results might not display as expected in your report if you have applied filters to your report's lenses in Analytics Studio.

For example, a Financial Report Builder report might contain a high-level source lens containing home value and GLA details, and a drill lens containing transaction date, transaction name and measure columns displaying data in home and dual currencies. This second drill lens has a filter applied to only return data within a selected date range.

If you drilled from the source table to a value in the home currency column, for example 30 GDP, then the drill table would sum this value in the home value column to 30 GDP. However, because of the date filter applied to the drill lens in Analytics Studio, you would see a date-restricted value in the dual value column, for example 5 GDP.

Grouping within Lenses

Lenses with measures sorted outside of groups by ascending or descending order are not supported. For example, you might apply the following groups to a lens created with the Financial Transactions dataset:

  • General Ledger Account Name
  • Financial Period End Date

If you were then to click Downward chevron. next to one of these groups, and apply Sort Descending or Sort Ascending, then this lens would not be supported in Financial Report Builder.

Reporting Errors

To improve the resolution of any errors encountered when using Financial Report Builder, we recommend your administrator add the Analytics Debug Logger to the Lightning Record page layout. for your financial statement or report. This optional step enables you to provide Customer Support with details of errors by downloading log files from Financial Report Builder.

Warning:

Your log file might contain sensitive data and system information. We recommend that these files are only shared with Certinia Customer Support.

  1. Navigate to your financial report or statement.
  2. Click Setup | Edit Page.
  3. Search for and select the Analytics Debug Logger from the Components panel.
  4. Drag and drop the Analytics Debug Logger to your required location on the Lightning Record page layout.
  5. Click Save.

An option to download your log file is now available on your financial report or statement.