I'm new to cubes and struggling with how to put budget
data into a cube.
Our company does budget figures at a very broad level - By
State, by Business Unit, By Month. So for us, that's 6
states x 3 Business units x 12 months. This is partly
because we deal in the financial arena, not in physical
stock of nuts and bolts.
But I can get actual sales data to an extremely granular
level - by client, by day, by sales person etc. etc.

I can think of only three ways to solve this dilema:
1. Get the people who prepare budgets to prepare them to a
much more granular level
2. Write some code that based on historical trends, will
then generate budget figures at a more granular level
3. Not put budget figures in the cube at all.

Is my thinking correct? Or am I missing something?

Thanks in advance.

Here is another way:

Create special cube for budgeting only, which will have same (or less)
dimensions asActual cube. However, disable levels below the granularity you
need, i.e. for geography dimension, even though it has levels of Country,
State, City, etc, you will disable all the levels below State. Same with
other dimensions.
Then, you can build a virtual cube which will combain your Actuals cube with
Budget cube.

HTH,
Mosha.

--
==================================================
Mosha Pasumansky - www.mosha.com/msolap
Development Lead in the Analysis Server team
All you need is love (John Lennon)
Disclaimer : This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and
confers no rights.
==================================================

Geoff:

It is actually quite easy to facilitate what you need. You simply
create a series of shared dimensions (i.e. Business Unit, Time etc.)
with the appropriate levels. Create one cube for your Actuals to the
lowest-level of granularity in your data. Then create a second cube
for your budget where you disable some of the lower level of
granularity.

From within this cube simply open up the dimension to view the levels
on the left side of the cube editor and then from the Advanced
Properties of the level that you don't want to use select Disabled =
Yes.

By creating this second cube you can then create a virtual cube to
compare the results of both together. Obviously when you drill down
you won't see budget data past where to specify, but at the
high-levels everything will look cool.

HTH,

Barry