Convert report to planning

If you have followed the step-by-step of doing a report, this section will show you how to convert the report to a planning report with write-back functionality.

Click on the three dots in the upper right corner of the report and choose Edit from the menu. In the Visual Settings in the upper left corner and switch on the Input Mode.



When switching on Input Mode, Aimplan need to know on which table you want to write data to. Go to the Aimplan Admin Portal and create an Access Token. Paste the token in the Access Token field and choose the table you want to store data in.

If you are missing the table, you'll need to create it in the Admin Portal

When you set a report into Input Mode, you'll see that Aimplan will warn you about missing keys.



As you can see, Aimplan requires Scenario and a Date key-fields. This is the minimum criteria when storing a value but probably you want to attach some more dimensions the the values you are storing. Aimplan has detected three key fields that you also may want to add (CostCenter, Account and Currency)

To add the mandatory key fields, you need to connect to the Aimplan Azure database. Login for this was sent to you when you signed up and got an Aimplan Instance. How to connect and add the Aimplan tables in Power BI you can read about here

So when you have the tables that you need you just drag the fields into the key fields. In our scenario below, we decided to, except the mandatory key fields, drag in AccountKey and CostCenterKey to store the value with.



When the original report were created, we had dragged out Year-Month as columns and that is what we also want to store our values in. Aimplan must have a valid date to store on and the format must be YYYYMMDD so we need to create a calculated column that returns a valid date. In this case we want the first date in the month so if we store a value for 202306, the date in the table should be 20230601. Read more on how to do that here.

When you have dragged in the key fields you will probably see that the report doesn't supply any data anymore. This is because the table you chosen to save values to is empty. This behavior is easily fixed by dragging in the CurrentUserKey into the "Aimplan User Key" field.

The Aimplan User Key is mandatory to have in the report when you want to write back data but since it will also caues a cross join with data from all tables, empty data rows will automatically show up in the report. To read more about the user key you can click here

Now you want a field that you can use to store values in. How to create the measure field you can read about it here: Configure editable write-back measures in Power BI.

When the measure has been created, it's time to add this measure to the report. When we did the report in the previous section, we added Amount to the report, let's replace Amount with our measure field. Click on the three dots and choose Edit. Click on the column section we called Months.



Remove Amount from Values and add your measure (In our example, we called our measure "PlannedSalesQty". Click on the your measure in the Values box and set Editable to On. Change the default Measure to the measure id you want the value to be stored along with. To read more about measure and how you add them you can read here. Now you can click on the Preview button and see if you can edit some data.

If you can't edit data, it probably depends on the fact that we didn't allow top-down allocation (see the note information above). But the values you see in the cells are summarized cells. You can right click on a cell and choose "Show Data". This will show you how many rows that is beneath the cell you clicking on. In our example we want it be only one row when clicking on a single account row (if we click on a cost center row we'll get all account for the cost center).

Let's say you had dragged in a DateIntKey that returned every date instead of the first date in month it would look like this when you right clicked on february and clicked on "Show Data":



As you can see, every date in February is beneath the year-month 202102 and all thesee rows would be stored instead of 1 row with 20210201 as the date.

When you have successfully write data to the Azure database, you can see in the portal what data that was stored. Read more about how to do this here.

Since you are running Power BI Desktop, no automatic refresh is done so you'll need to do this manually. Click on the Optimize menu and Refresh visuals. The data you were written should be reported back in the same cells.