Dimensions - Part 2

Account Dimension

It’s helpful to understand the Account dimension because it is the basis for most reports. The Account dimension is organized into two different hierarchies: Primary Account Hierarchy and Alternate Account Hierarchy.

  • Primary Account Hierarchy is used in all applications and SRECNA reports.  The hierarchy is the same as BFS except for a few minor exceptions:
    • Financial Aid or Scholarships and Fellowships: Moved from Comp to Non-Comp
    • Other Employee Comp: Moved under Benefits
    • Parents added under Staff Salaries: Career, Contract, Casual
    • Room and Board: Moved under Auxiliary
  • Alternate Account Hierarchy includes the Recharge Hierarchy requested by units that receive recharge as income. In BFS, Recharge Income is coded as a contra expense account. In the Alternate Account Hierarchy, the recharge account has been moved out of expenses to a stand-alone account group in order to facilitate analysis.
    • Recharge(link is external) centers are units that provide specific, ongoing services to a number of campus units or projects, and recover the cost of providing these services from the unit served on a “rate basis”. University of California, Berkeley, Recharge Centers – Policy and Procedures
    • Recharge Reports are a set of reports created specifically to view the alternate account hierarchy with recharge as revenue. Recharge reports have an R suffix following the report #.

Chart2 and Program Code

  • Chart2 and Program Code are available for reporting in CalRptg and HCPRptg only and are not used for creating plans in CalPlan
  • Best Practice: When not reporting on an individual member, we recommend keeping these selections at the top of the hierarchy to include all data

Plan Only Members

To simplify planning and allow for high-level strategic budgeting in CalPlan, CalPlanning has created some “Plan Only” members in these dimensions: Account, Fund, and Chart1. This was done because of the large number of members that exist in these dimensions. For example, there are 9 different accounts for Travel. Rather than budget expenses to each detailed travel account, the planner can enter the sum of travel expenses into the 572XX – Travel – Plan account as shown here. Reports that compare plan (Forecast or Operating Budget) with Actual data will have summary data only in the Plan Only member for plan and detailed data for Actuals.

Note that Plan Only member names use “- Plan” as a suffix so they can be easily identified.

Some other examples of Plan Only members:

  • Account Members, e.g. “440XX – Private Gifts for Current Use – Plan”
  • Fund Members, e.g. “Unrestricted - Plan”
  • Chart1 Members, e.g. “C1_SUMPLN - C1 - Summary - Plan”

Chart showing detailed accounts in BFS and a single Plan account in CalPlanning with different amounts for each account but the same total amount at the rollup

Next Topic: Support