Sharing accounts across 2 plan types - Planning 9.3.1

Question

This is my first attempt to share accounts across 2 plan types and I am not getting expected results. In the setup, account 1234 was assigned to both Plan A and plan B with the "source plan type" as Plan B. When I create a form for Plan B, everything looks good and I can input data into account 1234. Then I created a similar form for Plan A using the same account. With all other dimensions being the same, I expect that I would see the data input for Plan B, account 1234 in the Plan A form as a read only field.
Are my expectations incorrect? If so, then I don't understand the benefit of sharing accounts across multiple plan types.
Any insight is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

One benefit would be how you use the same data in one plan type against the other. A simple example:
Let's say in your example Plan B represents Revenue and Plan A represents Expense - one way some people design Planning applications. Let's also say that your company calculates expense as a percent of revenue.
The revenue group enters revenue figures into acct 1234 into the Plan B form.
When the expense group pulls up the Plan A form, which also shows acct 1234 (but as read-only), they can now calculate against it. So an expense user can enter % values into some other acct in Plan A, "Exp % Rev", and have it calculate against the read-only acct 1234 being x-ref'ed from Plan B.
Plan B Form:
___________Jan__Feb
"acct 1234"_100__100 (input)
Plan A Form:
____________Jan___Feb
"acct 1234"___100__100 (read-only)
"Exp % Rev"__5%___5% (input)
"Rev Exp"_____5____5 (calculated)
The benefit here is that no data movement or copy is necessary between plan types for this to work, assuming the x-ref is dynamically calculated. Users can see data in both places.
This is just a simple example, however, and may not make sense in all situations.
Hope that helps!
-O