Using Dimensions to See What’s Really Driving Your Business
Updated: 14 hours ago
Your financial statements may tell you whether your company made money.
But do they tell you where—and why?
A company-wide P&L might show that revenue increased 12% and the business made $1.4 million. That's useful information.
But which locations made money? Which departments are becoming more expensive?
Which product lines generate the best margins? Which customer groups are most valuable? Is your fastest-growing region actually your most profitable? Is payroll increasing somewhere without a corresponding increase in revenue?
Those are the questions business leaders need answered.
See Your Business Through the Dimensions That Matter
Dimensions in Intuit Enterprise Suite can turn financial data you're already generating into multiple views of how your business is actually performing.
Think about the ways you mentally divide your own business.
Perhaps it's by region, department, business unit, location, product or service line, customer type or tier, sales channel, sales representative, project or job type, asset type—or another operating characteristic unique to your organization.
Those can become Dimensions.
Suppose you operate across four regions: North, South, East and West. Financial activity can be identified by region. Add other Dimensions important to your organization—perhaps department, product line, customer type or location—and management can begin looking beneath the company-wide totals.
And these aren't necessarily isolated views. Depending on how the organization is structured, leadership can combine multiple Dimensions to analyze the same financial activity from different perspectives. Instead of simply asking how a product line performed, you might want to know how that product line performed in the Northeast, for commercial customers, through a particular sales channel or team.
That's where the visibility starts becoming particularly interesting.
Now you can start asking:
Which region produces our best margins?
Which products are most profitable—and where?
What does payroll cost by department or location?
Which customer segments are driving our growth?
Where are expenses outrunning revenue?
Where are actual results falling behind our budget or forecast?
And the detail can go remarkably deep.
Dimensions can be associated with individual transaction line items, sales and expenses, payroll, products and services, and even fixed assets. That creates opportunities to analyze the business at a level that ordinary company-wide financial statements simply cannot provide.
Get the Detail Without Wrecking Your Chart of Accounts
Here's another advantage.
Businesses have traditionally tried to capture some of this information by adding more accounts and subaccounts to the chart of accounts.
Eventually, the accounting system can become unnecessarily complicated simply because management wants more ways to analyze the business.
Dimensions separate those two jobs.
Your chart of accounts can remain focused on properly organizing the accounting activity, while Dimensions provide additional ways for leadership to slice, compare and analyze the financial information.
And Dimensions aren't limited to explaining yesterday.
Budgets and forecasts can also be subdivided by Dimension.
So instead of merely discovering that the company missed its annual budget, leadership can potentially see where it missed, by how much, and which part of the organization caused the variance.
That's information management can act upon.
Now Imagine Doing That Across Several Companies
This is where Dimensions can become particularly compelling for a multi-entity business leader.
Dimensions can be standardized across entities in Intuit Enterprise Suite, creating a common way of looking at related businesses.
Imagine owning several companies and being able to ask:
Which entity is performing best? Which region performs best across the enterprise? How does the same department compare from company to company? Where are we making money? Where are we consuming it? And what does the combined enterprise look like?
That's considerably different from receiving five P&Ls and trying to figure out the story yourself.
The numbers were already there. Dimensions can help turn them into information you can actually use to run the business.
Another Lens: Projects
Dimensions are one way of looking deeper into a business. Projects provide another.
Used together, they can provide different and complementary views into performance, costs and profitability.
We'll take a closer look at Projects in another installment of our CFO Advisory series.
Part of Our CFO Advisory Series
This is the first in our CFO Advisory series exploring practical ways business leaders can gain better financial visibility and use their financial information to make better-informed decisions. Next: how Projects can help leadership understand where individual jobs and engagements are really making—or losing—money.
Could Better Financial Visibility Help You Run Your Business?
If you're reading this and thinking, “I'd like to be able to see my business that way,” we'd like to explore it with you.
We'll take the time to learn about your organization—whether it's a single business or a group of related entities—how your accounting and reporting work today, what information leadership currently receives, and, perhaps most importantly, what you wish you could see that you can't easily see now.
Bring your questions. We'll ask some of our own.
As an Intuit Gold ProAdvisor with Enterprise Suite certification, FPG-USA can help you explore how Dimensions and other Intuit Enterprise Suite capabilities might apply to your particular organization and coordinate with Intuit resources when appropriate.
We don't begin with the assumption that Enterprise Suite is right for you.
The first step is understanding what you need, what the platform can do, and whether the two fit.
If they do, we'd enjoy helping you build financial visibility your leadership team can actually use to run the business.
Have a problem or situation you’re not sure how to handle? I’m always glad to take a look and weigh in.
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