NAV Dimensions

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  Luc_VanDyck Member, Moderator, Administrator Posts: 3,633

  2015-01-21

  There are some videos on YouTube about Dimensions: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_ ... namics+nav

  No support using PM or e-mail - Please use this forum. BC TechDays 2024: 13 & 14 June 2024, Antwerp (Belgium)

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  Miklos_Hollender Member Posts: 1,598

  2015-01-27

  You can look at it multiple ways. If you are familiar with the concept of OLAP, the idea of "dimensions and measures" used in OLAP, that is useful, because that is probably where the name came from. Although the word "OLAP" itself is never used inside NAV, you can say that the idea of Analysis View Entries, Item Analysis View Entries, Analysis By Dimensions, Item Analysis by Dimensions, are more or less OLAP-oriented ways to look at data, you culd say these are "data cubes".
  
  Or you could look at it from an accounting angle. Many countries, like Germany, have strong Cost Accounting traditions, there is now a separate module for that, but formerly this was partially doable by sticking two global dimensions on every accounting entry: Department and Project. For example, if you work in IT department and spend 50% of your working time on implementing NAV-in house and spend another 50% of general IT support, they could book your salary to the G/L Account "Personnel Costs", using the dimension (usually global dim 1) of the IT Department (or "IT cost place") and 50% to the dimension (usually global dim 2) of the NAV project, 50% to the IT support project. At the end of the month or year, they can sum it up and say that the IT department costed us so much money, IT support as a project (not really a project, more like a "cost bearer", or "activity", this is also often used Activity Based Costing) costed so much money, the NAV implementation project or activity so much money.
  
  The third way to look at it is that they are freely configurable fields and there are built in analysis capabilites for using them, generally the Accounting Schedules and Sales Analysis Reports are very configurable and very useful. You can configure without coding reports like sales per region per product group, this month, last month, % of budget and so on. For this purpose you would attach your dimensions to master data like customer, item, salesperson, responsibility center. It is up to you how do you define them. For example it is common for dimension to be an product category, in this case attached to the product. Or customer category, or customer region. But it could be anything as long as it can be clearly linked to master data, so you can tell which item or customer etc. belongs to which. It is also possible to fill these out during posting orders, but that is a bit tedious. Still, for example on the purchase side this is often done, you cannot know beforehand if a vendors invoices of services go to which department so often you decide it at posting the purchase invoice.

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