Definition and Purpose of Sheets

Sheets are Financial Reporting's adaptation of Excel sheets, accessible through the Financial Reporting web platform. They provide a tabular format for capturing, displaying, and manipulating data using rows and columns, creating an environment familiar to Excel users. Users can input and update data just as they would in Excel, arranging information in a tabular format with rows and columns representing different dimensions. Within a sheet, sections can be created to enter and present data at different levels. This dynamic nature of Financial Reporting sheets overcomes many limitations of Excel.

Sheets use metrics as the point of data collection and storage. Metrics in Financial Reporting sheets refer to sets of data with similar attributes, such as dimensions. A sheet can contain one or more metrics. Metrics can be of different types based on their purpose, including Input, Formula, Parent, Summary, and Linked. Each of these metric types can have different data types (text, number, percentage, currency, dimension, etc.) based on requirements. Metrics from different sheets can be combined and manipulated, allowing users to create new metrics as outcomes of computations and alterations on existing ones. Metrics serve as key dimensions that enable Financial Reporting to capture the calculation logic for a dataset. This information helps users understand, organize, and analyze their data effectively within the Financial Reporting platform.

For instance, consider Gross Sales Price as a metric with a numerical value, capturing data regarding sales across various departments. Discount is a percentage metric. By utilizing these two metrics, a third metric, Net Sales, a formula metric, can be derived. Net Sales would represent the discounted amount and can be calculated as the product of Gross Sales Price and Discount. This flexibility of Financial Reporting sheets allows the creation of new metrics through computations on existing ones, providing an easy, comprehensive, and customized approach to analyzing and understanding data within the platform.