Sorting Financial Dimensions - Technical and Functional

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Some may be interested in their financial dimensions being sorted in a particular way while others may not care. Below we have two potential solutions for displaying financial dimensions in a specific way.

The Technical Way

This article outlines how to remove a ORDER BY so your financial dimensions will display in the order in which they are created. If you created your financial dimensions in the order you want to see this, this may work. However, it has two drawbacks. First, this is a modification to code that may need to be looked at during every CU and KB. Most likely not but if there is a non-technical solution, its worth looking at. Second, this only lets you display by the order they were entered in. If you enter three then four months later want to add one more but have it be at the beginning of the display, you are out of luck.

The Functional Way

You can use some standard functionality to sort your dimensions in whatever order you like and also provide more descriptive titles for your dimensions. First, lets consider a set of financial dimensions.

We have items sorted alphabetically. Let's say I want the order to be Store, Channel then Cost Center and leave everything else where it is? i can do the following:

First, pick a character or sort of characters to put in front of the dimension names that will remain constant. I use FD for Financial Dimension.

Next, name all of your Dimensions with the characters you picked and add a zero padded number after it, followed by an underscore then the name of the dimension that was already there, like so:

Once you have everything in the order you would like, go to Translations:

Next, you can fill in the translation for that dimension to the language(s) in your organization. You can expand upon what is being represented here with something more descriptive. For instance, you can change "Store" to display "Retail Store". You can also just add spaces so "CostCenter" is "Cost Center" (with a space). A few examples are below.

You can set your numbers however you like as they will instantly sort in the grid after you select a different dimension. You could do FD100_, FD200_, and so on which leaves room for other dimensions to move around without having to re-order everything. Once you are done re-arranging your financial dimensions, you can check them out by going to any with financials dimensions, like a Sales Order.