Filtering by Time Period

Virtually all spend reports have date range parameters. Most reports do not present data by time period but by some combination of other dimensions. However, the spend data for these reports is still filtered by selecting associated time periods at the lowest level. The beginning and ending dates of the time periods must be completely encompassed by the date range in order to be selected.

For example, for a reporting calendar with months at the lowest level, the date range parameters of 07/01/2004 to 12/31/2004 will encompass six months, July through December. However, a date range of 07/15/2004 to 08/15/2004 will return no data because this range does not include even one full month, from beginning to end. It includes two incomplete months.

Some reports do present data by time period. The standard Over Time reports (the Spend by Commodity Over Time report is one example) are filtered by the highest-level time period, which typically represents years. Spend totals by year are presented. More detailed data for each year can be seen by drilling down through one year to quarters and then from a quarter to the months in that quarter.

If the date range parameters of these Over Time reports do not encompass the beginning and end dates of at least one year, no data is displayed. It is not unusual to specify default date range parameters in the spend configuration document which represent the last four quarters, a rolling year. (The range is updated when a new quarter starts.) Although the date range might represent a year, it will not encompass the beginning and ending date of any year time period unless the last four quarters happen to coincide with all four quarters which compose one year (which would only happen one quarter out of four).

Changing the Time Level

There are two ways to create reports that display data by top-level time period to display results. One is to manually change the date range of the report to encompass one or more years from the reporting calender. However, this method would be tedious.

Another method is to direct the report to skip the top level of years and go directly to the second or third level, which has date ranges that are encompassed by the date range parameters. The directive to specify a time level is named dimLevelTime. It can be added as a URL parameter in the Analysis page setup for each report to be affected. The form of the URL parameter is:&dimLevelTime=2

The URLs for standard reports are not editable in production mode, so new, custom report items must be created for each of the reports to be affected. Then the corresponding standard report items must be hidden.