Ways to model different DAX calendar date situations
Part four of a six-part series of blogs

In the real world (or at least, the DAX version of it), calendars and dates aren't quite as simple as one would like. This blog shows how to solve a number of common scenarios, including where different tables have different levels of "granularity", coping with special days like bank holidays, handling non-standard finanical year-end dates and dealing with a table which contains more than one date column.

  1. Modelling techniques when working with calendars/dates
  2. Dealing with varying date granularity using calendars
  3. Modelling bank holidays and other special days
  4. Modelling different financial year-ends (this blog)
  5. Handling multiple date columns using multiple tables
  6. Handling multiple date fields using multiple relationships

This blog is part of our online SSAS Tabular tutorial; we also offer lots of other Analysis Services training resources.

Posted by Andy Brown on 22 January 2016

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Modelling different financial year-ends

Most organisations have a year-end which isn't the 31st December.  This blog contains some ideas on how to model this.

For this blog I'm going to assume that your year-end is 31st March, but the techniques shown can be adjusted - in what I hope is a fairly obvious way - to suit any year end date.

Categorising dates by financial year

One way to work out in which financial year a date lies is to create calculated columns as shown below:

Financial year columns

Here I'm using an interim column called FinYearInterim to make my formulae simpler and easier to read.

 

Here are formulae that you could use for each of the columns above:

Column Formula
FinYearInterim =if(month([date])<=3, year([date]), year([date])+1)
FinancialYear =([FinYearInterim]-1) & "/" & RIGHT([FinYearInterim],2)

For the first column, this works out whether any given date is before or after March, when the financial year ends; the second column concatenates the previous year's number with the last two digits of this year.

This is a formula I put together myself; I suspect there's a more elegant way to solve this!

Using financial years in pivot tables

You could now use your FinancialYear column for reporting:

Pivot table by financial year

Here I'm showing total sales by species and financial year/month.

 

The results could look something like this:

By financial year

The problem is that the months aren't correctly sorted - April to December should appear before January to March.

Sorting months correctly in the financial year

The solution to this is to create a new column sorting months correctly:

Month sort order

If the month number is less than or equal to 3 (ie if it's January, February or March), add 100 to the number.

You could now press F4 to show the properties of the MonthName column: 

Month name column

We want to change how the month name is sorted.

 

Choose to sort this column using our new MonthSortOrder column: 

Sort by Column

Specify which column SSAS Tabular should sort months by.

 

The result is that months and years appear where they should:

Months sorted correctly

The months now come in the right order!

 

Getting cumulative totals and other functions to work 

Many date functions have an optional third argument for the financial year-end to use:

The YearEndDate argument

A typical date function - the [YearEndDate] can be set optionally.

If you wanted to show the cumulative year-to-date total for some statistic, you could use a formula like this:

Year to date:=TOTALYTD(

sum('Transaction'[Quantity]),

Calendar[Date],

"31 March")

Note that SSAS Tabular is intelligent enough to realise that the 3rd argument should be taken to be the year end date, not a filter.

You could then display this in a pivot table to make everything hunky dory:

Year to date figures

The year-to-date figures accumulate up to 31st March, rather than 31st December.

 

 

For the last two parts of this blog, I'll look at two different ways to solve the same problem: that which arises when a table contains two or more dates.   

  1. Modelling techniques when working with calendars/dates
  2. Dealing with varying date granularity using calendars
  3. Modelling bank holidays and other special days
  4. Modelling different financial year-ends (this blog)
  5. Handling multiple date columns using multiple tables
  6. Handling multiple date fields using multiple relationships
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