Skip to main content

DW PH/Cloud Info: Solver Turbo

Peter Forsberg
  • Created

  • Updated

Summary

This article details Turbo, first presented at Ascend 2020, as a data aggregation to provide faster reports for organizations with very large data sets, specifically General Ledger data.

Article Section:

Requirements

Requesting Solver Turbo

Turbo is free, you simply need to submit a support request to Solver (support.solverglobal.com). Your Support representative will forward your request to Solver Development to begin the implementation. Please allow a day or two for the request to add Solver Turbo to your tenant to be completed, your support representative will let you know once it has been completed.

While Turbo is free, not everyone is a candidate for it. Turbo will give clients optimized reports with the following conditions:

  • Must be a Solver Cloud Customer.
  • Speed improvements will be noticeable for customers with larger sets of data, in the multi-millions for GL Summary or GL detail.
  • Users must use hierarchical trees on the Entity and Account Dimension. Existing trees, if properly configured, can be referenced. See the next section for more details.
  • Users are looking for and are okay with a “higher” level summary of their data. Drilldown to GL detail is available.
  • Category and Currency must be enabled on the General Ledger, however dimension values do not need to be populated to these dimensions.
  • Do not modify the columns of the Turbo module from the Module Schema page, this will result in the Turbo process failing.

Solver will analyze your database to determine if you are a candidate for Turbo. In some cases, it may be communicated that Turbo may not improve speeds and other options should be investigated.

 

Configuration

Once Turbo has been implemented into your tenant. The following steps should take place.

  1. Verify Turbo availability. Users can validate this by checking for
    1. In the Overview menu, a new module labelled GL Turbo.
    2. In the Data > Rules menu, there should be a new rule call GenerateTurboData.
  2. Create your Data Warehouse Trees
  3. Update and Run your integrations and Jobs

 

Data Warehouse

Trees

The Turbo feature utilizes Account and Entity trees. Existing hierarchical trees may be used or customers may create a tree specifically for this process.

The tree structure must start from a “top of tree” node and have branches established for each level that will be included in the financial reports. Additional guidance on tree configuration can be found in the course Report Design Advanced Concepts https://learn.solvertraining.com/report-design-advanced-concepts available in the White Papers collection in Solver Academy as free content.

Trees may be configured from the Data Warehouse > Overview > Account > Trees and may also be imported from this menu. For users who choose to import a tree, a tree import file should be created with the following format

mceclip0.png

  • Row 1: A header row that will have the naming convention “Level#”, where # is an 1,2,3… depending on the number of levels in your hierarchical tree.
  • Rows 2-N: the structure of your tree. All codes written into these cells must exist in the respective dimension (Account or Department) including rollup levels such as Top, North America and Europe.

Save the tree as a .csv file and import via the Data Warehouse Menu.

 

Data Integration

Turbo utilizes a business rule to populate the data into the GL Turbo Module, referencing the Account and Entity trees for the aggregation rollups. The business rule will be populated in your tenant as part of the enabling of Turbo.

Before proceeding, it is assumed that your General Ledger data has already been loaded. As a reminder, Currency and Category must be enabled on the General Ledger as well. This can be verified and added from the Data Warehouse > Configuration > Module Schema menu.

To begin

  1. Navigate to Data Warehouse > Data > Rules. Click on the Run icon to begin executing the rule. mceclip1.png
  2. Click the lookup on each parameter, choosing the hierarchical tree. mceclip2.png
  3. As previously mentioned, trees for the Account and Entity dimension must be configured. Below is a screenshot of what the rule parameter grid can look like. mceclip3.png
  4. Click Run. The process will begin. Depending on the size of the trees and the amount of data, the rule can take a couple minutes to run at most.

 

At this point you have now successfully configured and ran the Turbo data load process. Navigating to Data Explorer and selecting GL turbo, the module should now be populated with aggregated data. This rule can be manually executed after the General Ledger Summary data has been loaded or may be added to a Job as a step following the loading of General Ledger data.

The next section will detail template reports that are available along with building your own reports off this data.

 

Reports

Included with the Solver Turbo implementation are two standard financial reports, an income statement and a balance sheet. These reports will present consolidated data (top level of the entity tree) and be adapted by Solver to work out of the box with your account tree. These reports can be used as examples to create additional reports if needed.

Reporting from the Turbo module is intended for high-level reporting, not highly detailed reports at the department level as an example. Those types of reports should still be based on the GL Summary module.

The data schema available in the Turbo module are:

  • Account (dimension)
  • Category (dimension)
  • Entity (dimension)
  • Period (dimension)
  • Scenario (dimension)
  • Currency (dimension)
  • Is Aggregate (module attribute)
  • Value1 (module attribute)

Limitations:

  • Customization of the data schema for individual customers is not included as part of the free Turbo program.
  • Multi-currency organizations are not supported.
  • Parameter-based sheet per value functionality is not supported in Turbo reports based on trees. Sheet per value is supported if dimension attributes are used for report definition.

A key data field for building reports that take maximum advantage of the aggregated data in the Turbo data set is the Is Aggregate dimension. This will have a value of N for the non-aggregate data and Y for the aggregate data created by the Turbo script. Non-aggregate data is at the leaf node level for both the entity and account. Reporting from non-aggregated data limits or removes the speed advantage versus reporting from the GL Summary data. Setting a sheet filter of Is Aggregate = Y will limit the report query to the much smaller universe of data created by the aggregation script.

 

Technical Information

GL Turbo Schema

The GL Turbo has the following module schema and cannot be modified

  1. TransactionId
  2. Account
  3. Entity
  4. Scenario
  5. TimePeriod (Period)
  6. Currency
  7. Category
  8. Value1, Value2, Value3
  9. IsAggregate (UDF001)

Users may rename any of the above-mentioned fields but the following actions should not be done

  1. Delete any of the above-mentioned fields
  2. Removing any of the above-mentioned fields

Additionally, dimensions and attributes can be added to the GL Turbo module but these columns will not get populated with their corresponding General Ledger data. Additional business rules can be created to populate this data.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

  1. Does the Solver Turbo module go against my module count? No, it does not. This module is free.
  2. Does the Solver Turbo data go against my data storage limits? No, it does not.
  3. How much does Solver Turbo cost? It is free at this time.
  4. Is drilldown available? Drilldown is available to GL Detail only.
  5. Can I budget to Solver Turbo? Budgeting is not available to GL Turbo module

 


    Attachments

Related articles

Powered by Zendesk