Financial Reporting and the DW

Unless there is a strong leader with a good vision and the ability to consensus build, Enterprise reporting can be a lot like herding cats.

How do people deal with the finance department? They have to report to the board and insist on taking information from the transaction system. I tell them there is no way their data will jive with data from anybody else. They have a limited few and the data and don't to aggregate it in all the various ways that the rest of the company looks at the data.

How does this usually work? Does a DW feed the financial reporting? Does the DW bring in the financial data (general ledger) and do the reporting? Are they kept completely separate?

I tell them there is no way their data will jive with data from anybody else.

It damn well better jive, otherwise the company is in deep do-do...

It's a matter of context (i.e. dimensions). Data should be collected from the operational systems in a manner suitable for use by anybody... accountants included. Failure to do so leads to problems. Such failure is often due to how DW projects are perceived and funded. If you have the sales department funding the project, they usually don't care about and would not fund the inclusion of accounting information in the subject areas. This is a root problem that can best be resolved through education and a program orientation to DW development.

To your question, sure... GL and subledger data can and does belong in the DW.

The finance department wants to report everything to the board. In addition to the information from the GL, they also want to report key metrics such as membership. Membership can be a tough number to report. We have retroactivity in our membership numbers - everyday we receive notification from accounts that a member should have been terminated 2 months ago or a new member's coverage should have started 2 weeks earlier. I can run the exact same query against the transaction system that counts members on the exact same date today and tomorrow and come up with different numbers.

As far as payments go... we have to deal with reworked claims, lost checks, etc. If the data from the source system isn't cut on the same day and use the same business rules, the numbers will not foot. I think the Financial data should be fed into the DW and the reporting come from there.

Again, its a matter of context. For example, for membership it is a matter of tracking when things happened as well as when you knew about it. Being able to report both numbers: what was reported in financial statements, and what is known now or 3 days ago, should not be a problem.