The Reporting Wall: When Class Tracking Isn’t Enough
For many businesses using QuickBooks Online, class tracking is the go-to tool for segmenting financials. It’s a great first step, allowing you to see profitability by department or business line. But as your business grows more complex, a single dimension is no longer enough.
You start asking harder questions:
- What’s our profitability by product line, broken down by sales region?
- Which project managers are delivering the highest margins across all our service types?
- How are our marketing expenses trending by customer segment?
Answering these questions with a single dimension requires cumbersome workarounds and exporting data to spreadsheets for manual manipulation. You’ve hit the reporting wall.
IES Capabilities: 20 Dimensions of Financial Clarity
Intuit Enterprise Suite (IES) demolishes that wall with multi-dimensional reporting, an efficient method to set up and partition data by custom attributes. This feature is designed specifically for businesses that need to understand their financial reports at both the company level and by specific business drivers.
Here’s what dimensional reporting in IES offers:
- Up to 20 Custom Dimensions: Move beyond a single class to create up to 20 unique dimensions to categorize your data. These can be anything that matters to your business: departments, locations, business units, customer/vendor/employee segments, revenue categories, product types, and more.
- Unlimited Hierarchy: Create up to five levels of hierarchy within your dimensions. For example, you can create a “Geography” dimension with a hierarchy of Region > State > City > Store.
- Tag-Level Granularity: Tag transactions where it counts—at the transaction level and/or on individual line items for both accounts payable and receivable. This gives you unparalleled precision in your analysis.
Use Cases: How Dimensional Reporting Drives Better Decisions
With IES, you can build investor-ready reports that answer your most complex questions with a few clicks.
- For a SaaS Company: Create dimensions for Product Tier (Basic, Pro, Enterprise), Customer Segment (SMB, Mid-Market), and Billing Cycle (Monthly, Annual). Instantly run a report showing Revenue by Product Tier, filtered for Mid-Market customers on an Annual plan.
- For a Construction Firm: Use dimensions for Project Manager, Job Type (New Build, Remodel), and Region (North, South, West). Analyze job costs by Job Type, grouped by Project Manager, for the Western region only.
- For a Franchise Network: Set up dimensions for Franchise Location, Store Type (Mall, Standalone), and Marketing Campaign. Track the P&L of each location and measure the ROI of a specific marketing campaign across all standalone stores.
The benefit is clear: you get faster, deeper insights that lead to smarter, data-driven decisions.
How OOTB Helps You Build Your Reporting Framework
Setting up a dimensional structure is powerful, but it requires strategic thinking. As an expert Intuit partner, Out of the Box Technology doesn’t just give you the tool; we help you build the framework. Our consulting services can help you:
- Identify Key Business Drivers: We work with you to determine the dimensions that will deliver the most valuable insights for your specific business model.
- Design Your Hierarchy: We help structure your dimensions and hierarchies logically to ensure your reporting is both powerful and easy to understand.
- Build Custom Dashboards: We’ll help you create custom report templates and dashboards that put your most important key metrics front and center, allowing you to track performance against your goals in real-time.
Frequently Asked Questions
FAQ: Can dimensions be applied to journal entries or invoices? Yes. Dimensional tags can be applied at the transaction level, which includes both accounts payable and receivable transactions (bills and invoices) as well as journal entries. This ensures that even non-standard entries and balance sheet adjustments are properly categorized, giving you full confidence in the accuracy of your dimensional reports.
Ready to transform your reporting?
Stop fighting with spreadsheets and unlock the strategic insights hidden in your financial data.
Ask our experts how dimensional reporting could revolutionize your business.
