I recently had the opportunity to attend Convergence, the annual Microsoft Dynamics conference, where Microsoft partners, customers and industry experts come together to learn, share and promote. http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/convergence

This year I took the opportunity to attend several sessions on Microsoft Forecaster to learn tips and tricks and best practices from the experts themselves. Since we are ramping up for a Forecaster implementation with a client who is also using Analytical Accounting (AA) in Dynamics GP, I was particularly interested in the integration aspects of AA and Forecaster.

Prior to Convergence, I could not locate any documentation specific to AA integration with Forecaster, and the session presenters each confirmed that there really isn’t any documentation on the subject. One of the benefits of attending Convergence is that partners and customers alike can speak with the presenters, the experts who are either implementers and/or technical support engineers, one-on-one after the sessions. This is where I asked, exactly how does one go about bringing AA data from GP into Forecaster?

Each presenter stated the same thing: it all comes down to the segments. In Forecaster, you set up segments to represent the segments in your chart of accounts. For example, if you have a chart structure of XXXX-YYYYYY where XXXX represents your facility or entity, and YYYYYY represents your account, in Forecaster you can set up a segment called Facility with a length of 4 characters and a segment called Account with a length of 6 characters.

Setup >> Segments >> Definition

If you also want to bring AA data into Forecaster for budgeting and forecasting purposes, you will need to create another segment in Forecaster that represents your AA dimension(s). But before we dive in and create an additional segment, what about that “Assign” checkbox on the Segments definition window? The Assign setting tells Forecaster which segment to use for assigning security, and only one segment can be assigned. Our client wants to assign security by department, since department managers are ultimately responsible for departmental budgeting and forecasting. Department happens to be one of their AA dimensions and not a segment in their chart of accounts. And their Facility segment is also important for security purposes; i.e. which users have access to which facilities’ budget data. So the question is, how can we structure the Forecaster segments such that security can be assigned appropriately to allow users access to only their facilities and departments?

The answer is to concatenate the facility and department segments into a single segment.

We then created rollups in Forecaster to mimic the Facility/Department hierarchy that we have in GP between chart of accounts segments and AA dimensions. The combined use of concatenated segments and rollups in Forecaster was a good balance of managing security while still allowing enough flexibility in importing and working with the AA-level data.