Dimensions

Dimensions in Microsoft Dynamics–Navision ® help you to better understand where your business is going.

Key Benefits:

Explore how your business operates on various levels.

Grow and change your tools along with your business.

Base important decisions on information you can trust.

“The entire dimensions concept is especially useful at our headquarters, giving us the ability to control certain dimensions centrally, while leaving others at the discretion of our local offices.”

“Dimensions enable an easy shift to new and unforeseen business models, meaning we can grow in all kinds of new directions.”

All quotes are attributed to Svend Thomsen, CFO Oticon A/S, www.oticon.com

Better Ways of Doing Business

The intricate set of relationships that make your business a success is often difficult to fathom. What factors make a particular product successful? Where are you failing to deliver? How do actual costs compare with allocated budgets?

The Dimensions feature in Microsoft Dynamics-Navision helps you answer questions about your business. By combining the analysis of different dimensions, you can get a better understanding of how well your business is operating, where it’s going and where it needs help.

Dimensions allow you to attribute characteristics to the information you record and use in your daily work, giving you the power to ask searching questions about your business and act upon the answers. You can seek more effective ways of doing business, develop your analytical tools in an easy way, and base important decisions on reliable information.

You can also use dimensions to allocate responsibility. By using dimensions on posted entries and budget entries, you have the ability to monitor how individual units (for example, a responsible department or region) are performing and to compare performance with other units (such as previous periods and budgeted amounts).

Room to Grow and Change

Dimensions grow and change with your business needs. When an opportunity presents itself, accountants and IT personnel don’t need to spend time changing accounting structures to fit new business processes. They can easily create or change existing dimensions.

The possibilities for creating new dimensions and changing existing ones are endless. It’s easy to add new dimensions on the fly, and there’s no limit to the number of dimensions, or the number of values, that can belong to each dimension. You can change existing dimensions to reflect your business processes because:

You can name them in a way that reflects your company’s reporting practices and the requirements of your employees.

When you no longer require a particular dimension, you can simply block it from use.

You can structure values in a hierarchy that mirrors your existing reporting structures.

You can change dimensions (or add new ones) as often as you like—without changing your accounting structure.

Information You Can Trust

You increase the consistency of data by setting up rules for dimensions. You determine how dimensions are combined in order to make sure that they reflect company policy. For example, you might want to ensure that the decision-making process reflects company policy by excluding some salespeople from using certain customer-segment dimension values.

You can also support the way your business operates by defining default dimensions. For each default, you can also define posting rules that determine the way dimensions information may be posted. For example, you can define that a dimension value must always be used for a particular account or account type. Defaults also ensure quicker data entry with fewer errors.