Problem with hierachy aggregation, only using last child to populate parent

Question

The following is a report that is dynamically generated:
ACCOUNT         Cash
2003 JAN          978,940
2003 FEB          1,141,812
2003 MAR          1,435,928
2003 Q1          1,435,928
2003 APR          1,663,463
2003 MAY          1,740,351
2003 JUN          1,758,067
2003 Q2          1,758,067
2003 JUL          2,124,283
2003 AUG          2,022,984
2003 SEP          2,470,520
2003 Q3          2,470,520
2003 OCT          1,522,778
2003 NOV          1,550,067
2003 DEC          2,741,664
2003 Q4          2,741,664
2003 TOTAL          2,741,664
You can see that for some reason the hierachy is not adding correctly, as it is solely taking the last month of the quarter and saying that it is the quarter's numbers. And taking the last quarter's numbers and saying that it is the year's.
I've also verified that it only occurs on asset and liability type accounts and not income and expense type accounts.
How is this occuring? 
Thanks,
Michelle

Answer 1

Hi Michelle,
The data that you attached is totally correct from an accounting perspective. Since BPC is used mainly by finance people, it follows this perspective.
Let me try to explain why this is correct;
There is one big difference between balancesheet accounts (AST/LEQ in BPC) and profit and loss accounts (INC/EXP);
Balance sheet accounts are always referring to a Period End closing amount which should always be the same for the total year, Q4 and the last month of a year (as shown in your example).
Profit and loss accounts on the other hand should only show the amount that are posted to these accounts for the selected period, so the total year should be added up from jan-dec, and Q4 should be an adding up of oct-dec, etc.
Periodic values (this period -/- previous period) for balancesheet accounts are only relevant for Cash-flow calculations and some movements that need to be reported on a periodic bases (ie Investments). Cash-flow is mostly calculated into a seperate account tree, Periodic investments, when a seperate subtable dimension (type s) is used, can standardly not directly be reported in Excel, but can be calculated in Excel by retrieving this period, the previous period and than calculate the difference for these two. Another solution might be to use a custom measure to do the trick.
Hope this helps,
Alwin