Consolidated Fact Tables
In the last section, we discussed comparing metrics generated by separate business processes by drilling across fact tables, such as budget and commitments. If this type of drill-across analysis is extremely common in the user community, it likely makes sense to create a single fact table that combines the metrics once rather than relying on business users or their BI reporting applications to stitch together result sets, especially given the inherent issues of complexity, accuracy, tool capabilities, and performance.
Most typically, business managers are interested in comparing actual to budget variances. At this point, you can presume the annual budgets and/or forecasts have been broken down by accounting period. Figure 7-19 shows the actual and budget amounts, as well as the variance (which is a calculated difference) by the common dimensions.
Again, in a multinational organization, you would likely...