May, 2015
From the Editor
At the end of April, members of the Budget Office and I teamed up to offer a Position Budget reporting workshop. Attendees, most of whom are senior administrators and have a fair amount of experience with Business Warehouse reporting, universally mentioned the value of having subject matter experts present. We were able to answer questions about the position budgeting process at the same time we could demonstrate how to use a BW report to highlight data related to those questions.
Based on this experience, we are now putting plans in place to provide a similar experience for employees in other business areas. The first of these revised intermediate-level sessions will be offered for the grants and funds management domains, and it’s our hope that we will be able to expand this to include other functional areas. These new sessions will begin in the next few weeks, so watch for upcoming schedule announcements.
Do you have ideas for the kinds of training sessions you would like to see jointly offered by business areas and BW training? If so, please let us know.
I hope you enjoy this issue of the Newsletter. Happy reporting!
Bill
Concur Data Available in the Business Warehouse
Expense data from the Concur Travel System has been loaded into the BUworks Business Warehouse (BW) on a daily basis since October, 2014. We don’t yet have a report that is specifically designed to display data pulled from the Concur System, but we have recently posted a document that describes how to use an existing BW report to view Concur data.
The document is available in the Document Library.
Some of these Tips may be new to you, while others may be familiar. Regardless, we hope you find value in these and future Tips, even if we do no more than remind you of the existence of tools you once knew about but had since forgotten.
Note: all of the Tips posted in our newsletters are archived on this page.
Entering Dates
Here is something that you may not know about: instead of entering date information in the long format that SAP uses, you can enter dates using simpler notation. Complete information is available in the Help document How to – Specify Report Dates, but here are a few examples:
| Instead of… | You can enter this… | Note |
| 01/01/2015 | 1/1/15 | Calendar Year notation |
| 03/28/2014 – 06/14/2014 | 3/28/14 – 6/14/14 | Don’t forget to use the delimiter space + dash + space |
| 04/2015 | 4/15 | Fiscal Year notation |
| 01/2015; 02/2015; 03;2015 | 1/15 – 3/15 | Remember the delimiter |
| To specify all periods in FY 2015 through the current period | >=1/15 | Selects periods 1 through the current period |
Create and use a Report Variant
Do you find that you frequently specify the same variable values when executing a BW report? Maybe you enter the same group of grant numbers or BUIDs when attempting to perform a monthly reconciliation. By using a Variant, it is possible to save those variable values so they can be recalled, thereby avoiding the need to specify them again and again. Unlike a saved View (aka favorite), a Variant is available only to you and only to the report for which the Variant is created. You can create as many Variants as you need for any BW report and it’s easy to delete Variants when you no longer need them.
Read this Help guide to learn all about Variants: How to – Save and Use a Variant.
May Training Opportunities
Introductory Workshops offered this month
Sure, introductory workshops present to new employees – or employees assigned a new business role – the fundamentals of reporting for a particular subject area. But the sessions are a great way to review material, too. In fact, we have heard from many session attendees that taking a workshop a second (or even a third) time really helped them consolidate their understanding of their reports and the data underlying them.
Click on any of the following links for a course description and/to register for an upcoming session:
Supplier Resource Management Reporting
Labor Distribution (Payroll) Reporting (session held May 5; next session has been scheduled in June)
Intermediate-level Workshops offered this month
As of the May 7, no intermediate-level courses have been scheduled. As mentioned in the Editor’s Note, announcements will be distributed when the sessions are scheduled
Please visit this page to view a schedule of all upcoming BW sessions. If you don’t see a date or a location scheduled for the course you are looking for, send email to the BW trainer and let him know of your interest. If sufficient interest is registered, additional sessions will be scheduled.
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