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[Noreen Fujita-Sacco]

All demos seem to use two digit codes for global/advanced dimensions. Numeric codes seem to be recommended although the field is alpha-numeric. 

Does anyone have best practices? Does anyone have a recommendation on which type of coding will allow easiest changes to dimensions after initial setup, ie, numeric with decimals to allow inserting codes later?

Thank you.

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Noreen Fujita-Sacco
Applications Coordinator
Gear Aid Inc.
Bellingham WA
360-392-2703
noreen.fujitasacco@gearaid.com
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[Cynthia Priebe]

Dimensions and Dimension Values can be whatever makes sense to your business. In the Cronus Demo database, for example, the Dimension AREA is defined with Dimension Value Codes of 10, 20, 30.. The BUSINESSGROUP Dimension is setup with Dimension Value Codes of HOME, INDUSTRIAL, etc.

Remember, that depending how you setup defaulting for Dimensions, users may need to select the Dimension Values as they enter sales and purchase documents and/or create journal entries, etc. What you use for codes should make sense to your users. The Code is Alpha numeric for just this reason.

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Cynthia Priebe, MCTS, DCP
Senior Business Analyst and Project Manager
Liberty Grove Software
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[Noreen Fujita-Sacco]

Thank you, Cynthia. 

For small sets of dim values, I do see that alpha makes it easy to key. However, we have some dims with dozens of values. Do you have any feedback for those?

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Noreen Fujita-Sacco
Applications Coordinator
Gear Aid Inc.
Bellingham WA
360-392-2703
noreen.fujitasacco@gearaid.com
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[Cynthia Priebe]

Noreen,

When many values are involved for each dimension and possibly multiple dimensions, then I would suggest Dave Wiser’s advice makes sense. Remember that you may be able to set default dimensions on master data records making user selection on data entry less of an event.

Again, the great thing here is that with NAV you have options.

Good Luck!??

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Cynthia Priebe, MCTS, DCP
Senior Business Analyst and Project Manager
Liberty Grove Software
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[David Wiser]

Our company uses mainly alpha characters for our dimension values.  Numeric values can be preferred if you have someone doing a lot of manual keying of entries since it can be easier to key from the 10-key than from the keyboard.  But we try to minimize the manual entry so its not that big of an issue.  Another reason you might go numeric is for presentation purposes or for totaling in the dimension value page.  It can look better to have your values lines up or be able to filter for ranges than for specific values.  Really just depends on your company preference.

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Dave Wiser
Controller
Beckwith & Kuffel
Seattle WA
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[Noreen Fujita-Sacco]

Thank you, Dave.

I’ll set up sample data and do some more analysis using alpha codes.

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Noreen Fujita-Sacco
Applications Coordinator
Gear Aid Inc.
Bellingham WA
360-392-2703
noreen.fujitasacco@gearaid.com
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[Val Gameiro]

The only other thing I would add is if you want to total your dimension values, and your words don’t sort correctly alphabetically.

In other words, if you have several dimension values and you want to be able to sub-total them, like this:


Because of the alphabetical order of those values, PROD-WIDGET is outside of the totaling.

But if I use a numeric prefix, I can fix it easily, as in this image:

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Val Gameiro
Advanced Business Systems, LLC
Implementer/Project Manager
Austin, Texas
former NAVUG Austin Chapter Leader
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[Naveen Jain]

Agree with both Dave and Cynthia. You can setup either way it make sense for business, but more often it is easier to remember by name then by number specially for the keyboard users it is easier as alpha-numeric during the data entry.

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Naveen Jain
Director of IT
Symbex Companies
Santa Fe Springs CA
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[Meenakshi Singh]

Agree with Cynthia & Dave’s suggestions as well. in some cases, I have even used a combination of alpha numeric as well so that’s an option too if you want to review that.

Meenakshi

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Meenakshi Singh
Manager of Business Applications
Home Market Foods, Inc.
Norwood MA
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[Stephen Marsh]

Something more to consider, when you bring a two digit numeric Dimension Code in to Excel it will strip off any leading zeros. We found this one the hard way.

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Stephen Marsh
Enterprise Services Manager
Axxess Logistics
Vaughan
Canada
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[Angela Dunnahoe]

We use abbreviated names for our dimensions, and for the dimension that notes “business group” for our company, we have chosen a three-tiered dimension that allows us to slice the data more easily.  The first letter is “W” for wholesale or “R” for retail, followed by a dash, the next three letters indicate the next level of segmentation, and the final section is one more level.  So, for example, “R-DIR-WEBSITE is “Retail/Direct/Our website” , but “W-RES-ONLICAT” is “Wholesale/resellers/online and catalog”.  This allows for reports to be run with “W*” or “R-DIR*” and will grab all of the subgroups within that category.  Hope this helps!

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Angela Dunnahoe
Marucci Sports
Baton Rouge LA
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