If you have worked on Hyperion planning, PBCS; worked on dimensions, you must have heard consolidation properties. First of all, let’s take a step back and refresh our memory. What is consolidation properties? Consolidation properties determine how children roll up into the parent members. We can assign one consolidation property to a non-dimension or non-attribute member.

 

There are 7 types of consolidation properties:

 

• + Addition – Default
• – Subtraction
• * Multiplication
• / Division
• % Percent
• ~ Ignore
• ^ Never

 

Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and percent are very straightforward. But what is the difference between Ignore and Never? I remember when I started learning Hyperion planning, I asked this questions many times. Now let’s take a look at the definitions of ignore and never first, and then check a real example.

• Ignore: means that member will not participate or contribute value in it to the parent member in aggregation.
• Never: means that member will not participate or contribute value in it to its parent in aggregation and also it will not get aggregated across different dimensions.

 

Let me walk you through an example. To make things easier, we are going to focus on the following accounts:

Total Revenue, Product Revenue, and Services Revenue.

 

For Entity dimension, we will be focusing on Total Entity, Massachusetts, New York and California.

 

Prepare a Smart View data retrieve file.

 

Set up the consolidation property for California as Addition.

 

The result makes sense.

 

Then change the consolidation property to Ignore.

 

Refresh the database.

 

Check the result. We notice that the data in California is not rolling up to Total Entity. The data got ignored.

 

Then change the consolidation property to Never.

 

After refreshing the database, check the result again. We notice that not only California’s parent member Total Entity, the data is not rolling up to Total Revenue either. As we mentioned earlier, if we assign Never to a member, then the member will not get aggregated across different dimensions.

 

Hope this quick post gives you some ideas on the difference between Ignore and Never. See you next time.