One of our clients that I worked
at recently had a rather tricky report that they wanted me to
help with. At present, the report was put together using Excel,
and looked something like this:
The report consisted of two sections, the top section being
the actual, budget and variance figures for a department, and
the bottom section being a set of percentages based on the top
section. The first line of the report, net sales, was a
memorandum item detailing the net sales for the department. The
next two lines, gross profit and other income were then added
together by a spreadsheet formula to give the next line, total
net income. Next, wage costs, rent costs and other costs were
totalled to give total costs, with the figure for total costs
then being subtracted from total net income to give net
contribution. The percentages at the bottom of the report were
then calculated using these figures. Finally, variances were
calculated, again using an Excel formula, for each of the line
items.
As well as producing a report for each department, the client
also wanted to produce another copy, this time for the company
as a whole and derived from the figures in the department level
reports. The figures in the top half of the report would need to
be summed, whilst the percentages in the bottom half would need
to be averaged.
The client had tried to produce the report using Discoverer
and an account hierarchy, but the figures wouldn't add up
properly. Fundamentally, you can't (easily) produce this sort of
report in a tool like Discoverer because of all the inter-row
calculations that are going on - the figures for row 4 are the
sum of row 2 and 3, the figures for row 12 are the sum of rows 5
to 7 divided by row 1, and so on. Now they could write some
PL/SQL code that would load the data into a PL/SQL collection
and then process each figure individually, but a thought that
came to mind when we were discussing it was to try out the new
SQL MODEL clause.
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