Current Month vs. YTD

Question

I am wanting to show account balances for the Current Month vs. Year to Date. I am using a BSO cube and have heard that Dynamic Time Series don't work in OBIEE, which is where we're going to be building reports off this data. We want this calculation to be available from multiple front ends so we need to do the calculation in the cube.
I followed the following two suggestions to form a hybrid approach:
http://www.intellientblog.co.za/index.php/tag/essbase-ytd-calculation/
http://www.network54.com/Forum/58296/thread/1147201898/YTD+variance+calc
I created a new dimension with two members - Current Month (just a stored member) and YTD (dynamic calc) with the following formula: @SUMRANGE("Current Month",@CURRMBRRANGE ("Date", LEV, 0, -(@count (skipmissing, @lsiblings (@currmbr ("Date")))), 0));
At first I thought this was working great, I filtered down to a month in the Date dimension and everything looked good. However, my Date dimension (which is my time dimension) is set up like so:
Year
--Quarter
----Month
Which made it so my formula gave me QTD. I modified my formula to: @SUMRANGE("Current Month",@CURRMBRRANGE ("Date", LEV, 0, -(@count (skipmissing, @lsiblings (@currmbr ("Date")))+@count(skipmissing,@lsiblings(@parent(@currmbr("Date"))))*3), 0));
This doesn't work though - it always gives me quarter to date. When I have -(@count (skipmissing, @lsiblings (@currmbr ("Date")))+@count(skipmissing,@lsiblings(@parent(@currmbr("Date"))))*3) as the formula for a member it gives me the correct number, but as part of the YTD formula it always gives me 0.
Any ideas why this would be happening?

Answer 1

Ah apologies, had forgotten to ask if year and period are in the same dimension. So your Date dimension actually looks like:
2011
- Qtr1
-- Jan
-- Feb
-- Mar
- Qtr2
-- Apr
-- etc
2012
- Qtr1
-- Jan
-- etc
If this is the case then I think you have two options:
1. You set up an IF statement where the step back varies by period, e.g.
IF(@ISMBR (Jan))
YTD = @SUMRANGE("Current Month", @CURRMBRRANGE ("Date", LEV, 0, 0, 0));
ELSEIF(@ISMBR(Feb))
YTD = @SUMRANGE("Current Month", @CURRMBRRANGE ("Date", LEV, 0, -1, 0));
ELSEIF(@ISMBR(Mar))
YTD = @SUMRANGE("Current Month", @CURRMBRRANGE ("Date", LEV, 0, -2, 0));
etc
ELSEIF(@ISMBR(Dec))
YTD = @SUMRANGE("Current Month", @CURRMBRRANGE ("Date", LEV, 0, -11, 0));
ENDIF
If you have multiple Jan's e.g. Jan2011, Jan2012 you may want to assign a UDA and change the above to be IF(@ISUDA(Date, Jan)) and so on
2. Set up a member to store the offset value as a dynamic calc, lets call it OffsetYTD, you would need to have a similar IF, ELSEIF, ENDIF formula but no need to repeat all the range bits, e.g.
IF(@ISMBR(Jan))
0;
ELSEIF(@ISMBR(Feb))
-1;
etc
then your YTD formula becomes simpler:
YTD = @SUMRANGE("Current Month", @CURRMBRRANGE("Date", LEV, 0, OffsetYTD, 0));
If the offset is something you can re-use in other formulae / reports then I like option 2 (WFP and CapEx modules for Hyperion Planning use similar concepts for TP-Index and NumPeriods)
Hope this helps
Stuart