Hierarchy Management

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Hierarchies are needed for reporting purposes and to organize dimension members. Dimensions define your chart of accounts (COA) structure against which the Planful application stores the monthly summary financial account balances for an organization. You can access the Hierarchy Management page by navigating to Maintenance > Hierarchy Management.

Hierarchy Management is where all creation and editing of hierarchies will occur, including not only financial hierarchies, but also an entity, alternate, attribute, and dated hierarchies.

You can set up many types of hierarchies, but at the very least you will need to set up your Finance hierarchy and a Budget Entity hierarchy (for the Planning application). Budget Entity hierarchies allow budget users to work with their parts of the overall budget plan or forecast. Budget hierarchy data is derived from the mapped segments set up using the Define Financial Budget Entity configuration task page. Budget entities are made up of the combined segment members based on the segments selected during the Define Financial Budget Entity configuration task. Hierarchies are created for reporting and provide you with a way to summarize members. Generally, each hierarchy has a name, parents, and children. Hierarchies are created for segments you have defined.

Why Hierarchies are Needed?

Hierarchies are created for dimensions defined on the Define Financial Segments page (accessed by navigating to Maintenance > Admin > Configuration Tasks). Each dimension is represented as the main level of a hierarchy as shown below.In addition to the user-defined dimensions mentioned above, there are system-defined dimensions, such as reporting, scenario, and time. These system-defined dimensions work in conjunction with the user-defined dimensions to support planning, data loading, security, and reporting activities.

Note:

Hierarchies support up to 8 levels. If you go beyond 8 levels, you might experience performance issues.

Hierarchy Management is where all creation and editing of hierarchies will occur, Within the interface, there are 3 panes:

Left Pane: Select the hierarchy to work with which is then displayed in the bottom half of the left pane.
Center Pane: Displays the contents of the roll-up member on the left pane.
Right Pane: Displays properties of the member and where properties are defined and/or edited By navigating through these panes and utilizing the options along the toolbar, changes to members and their associated properties can be adjusted as needed.

Click here to learn more about the Hierarchy Management interface and learn about all its functionalities.

The below table gives you information on the different types of hierarchies you can create.

Hierarchy Type	When to Create this type of Hierarchy	Required/Not Required
Finance	This is the foundation hierarchy which represents your chart of accounts. A Finance hierarchy is generally created for each financial segment you define on the Define Financial Segments page	Required
Budget Entity	This hierarchy type contains budget entities and is used to manage budget workflows and assign budget responsibilities to budget managers. It allows budget managers to work with their parts of the overall budget plan or forecast.	Required for the Planning Application
Attribute	An Attribute Hierarchy can be used as an alternative common chart of accounts hierarchy.	Not Required
Alternate	It's important that Alternate Hierarchies are not confused with Multiple Set of Book Hierarchies. Alternate hierarchies provide information on a segment of your hierarchy and in some cases only certain members of that segment (based on how you set up the hierarchy). Alternate hierarchies use the same set of books for the alternate hierarchy and the segment the alternate hierarchy is based off.	Not Required
Multiple Set of Books (MSOB)	For MSOB, you will create a sibling hierarchy (to the main hierarchy versus a segment only). You might use MSOB when you need to provide financial statements for GAAP as well as IFRS.	Not Required
Dated	With Dated Hierarchies, you can manage a hierarchy based on periods, allowing you to create a new version of a hierarchy and take a snapshot of the existing version. This hierarchy is useful when you need to manage multiple versions of hierarchies which exist during different periods in time and you need to generate reports using different versions of organizational hierarchies which represent different reporting positions of individual entities.	Not Required

Once you create hierarchies, refer to

User Access to Hierarchies article to learn how you can provide user access to the hierarchies and dimensions.
Hierarchy Management for Dynamic Planning article to learn how hierarchy management is being used for Dynamic Planning.
FAQs for the Alternate and Dated Hierarchies

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Hierarchy Management Interface