About Soft Dates

Soft dates translate your financial period start and end dates into relative time buckets, such as Current Period or Last Quarter, that move automatically as time passes. This means you don't need to re-edit your report filters every month to keep them pointing at the right period.

Cumulative, Year to Date, and Opening Balance

When you configure a soft date, you can apply one or more of the following behaviors:

• Year to Date covers the start of the analysis year, for example January, up to the current period. Use it for profit and loss accounts.
• Cumulative covers the beginning of trading up to the current period. Use it for balance-sheet accounts, or for customers who don't run a year-end process.
• Opening Balance represents period 0, the first day of the new financial year, and separates brought-forward balances from the year's trading activity. The same value is returned in every period of the year. It's only meaningful where a year-end process runs, and applies to balance-sheet accounts only.
• Cumulative and Year to Date cannot both be selected on a custom period format, and neither can Opening Balance and Year to Date.

Soft Date Dimension

The soft date dimension isn't a fixed list of options. It is made up of the date fields available on your selected dataset, for example Financial Period Start Date, Financial Period End Date, or Transaction Date.

If your report uses a dataset that supports the year-end process, see Configuring Soft Dates for how the FRB Adjusted Year-End Balance Date dimension avoids showing zero balances in the last period of the year.