Aimplan Training
1. Base setup
Portal Overview
1min
To get access to an instance, either through Microsoft Entra ID or the Aimplan Portal, you need to be included as a user in that instance. To access the Aimplan Training, contact [email protected].
Sidenote: If you are currently looking in to purchasing Aimplan, contact us at [email protected] and we'll get back to you. If you know that your organisation already have an instance that you want to connect to, contact the administrator of that instance to have them add you as a user.
Once you have gained access to the Aimplan Portal as a super administrator or a consultant, you can start altering/setting up your instance!
- Home - When you go to the portal, you are first greeted by a Home page. From here, you can navigate through the different parts of the Portal. In your upper right corner, you can see which Instance you are currently working within and if you click on your initial, you can access links to the Aimplan Documentation and the Aimplan Feedback Portal, as well as functions to generate Access Token, Whitelist your IP-address , switch instance, alter your Palettes and turn on Experimental Features to preview what is upcoming.
- Users - If you go to Users, you can add/archive users and change user roles. To access an instance, it is necessary to be added as a user in the Aimplan Portal. Read more about User and User Roles here.
- Measures - This is also a system specific dimension necessary when editing values in an Aimplan Visual. The system measures are ways for you to separate your input values based on what unit they represent, i.e Plan Amount or FTE. Storing these on different measure keys enables you to easily separate your values on what they are actually representing. Read more about Measures here.
- Think about your naming strategy early on! You will use your measure keys in your DAX-measures, so it should be easy to follow. You could just follow a numeric Key Strategy (i.e M1, M2) or you could have shorts for what the measure actually refers to (i.e. PA = Plan Amount).
- Scenarios - This too is a system specific dimension that you need to be able to store values from the Aimplan Visuals. You use Scenarios to separate the same values for different contexts. Read more about Scenarios here.
- Think about your naming strategy early on! You might have entered values in an upcoming scenario, so you can't rely on a logic based on your input dates. If the key include what process its used for (i.e forecast), year, and forecast number - FC25Q1 - that would make it possible to define a measure for the "latest forecast".
- Always create at least two Scenarios when setting up your case, or you might miss how joins and values act when having multiple scenarios. It is our recommendation to set scenarios as a slicer, or at least never as a filter on a specific visual. Even if the starting point might be to just work with one scenario, it is not uncommon that more scenarios will come into place in order to compare scenarios or add forecast to a solution that was originally just intended for budgeting.
- Storage Tables - This is where you set up all the tables that you want to be able to store values in. That is, this is the place you write your edited values to. You can read more about Storage Tables here.
- Aimplan will write back values from your Power BI model based on the fields you have dragged into the Key Fields in the visual. You can use any dimension in your model to write to the storage table, as long as the dimensions are named exactly as the storage table fields. It is enough to change the name of a dimension in the Key Field in the Visual for Aimplan to understand what field it should be stored in. However, in order not to change names too much, it is our recommendation that you set up the custom key fields in your Storage Tables exactly the same as you have done in your original Power BI Model - that is with the same names and the same data types.
- Processes - With Processes, you can separate your solution into processes and subprocesses, enabling the Status Visual. Read more about Processes here.
- You have main processes, i.e Budgeting and Processing. Each process consists of one or many subprocesses, for example OPEX, Sales and Personnel. The subprocess would define a key for you to store a status on, an example of this would be; If the Sales Representative is done with their Sales Budget and want the Manager to approve their budget, we would need a key to store the Sales Representatives input on to make sure that status refers to the right report. That would be the key for the subprocess Sales in the process Budget.
In the Training Instance, all of the above steps have been prepared for you which means you will only work within Power BI.
Updated 10 Oct 2024
Did this page help you?