Calculating Variances or Percentage Variances Between Actual and Budget Values

You can use the @VAR and @VARPER functions to calculate a variance or percentage variance between budget and actual values.

You may want the variance to be positive or negative, depending on whether you are calculating variance for members on the accounts dimension that are expense or nonexpense items:

By default, Essbase assumes that members are nonexpense items and calculates the variance accordingly.

  To tell Essbase that a member is an expense item:

  1. In Outline Editor, select the member.

    The member must be on the dimension tagged as accounts.

  2. Open Formula Editor.

    See “Creating and Editing Formulas in Outlines” in the Oracle Essbase Administration Services Online Help.

  3. Tag the member as an expense item.

    See Setting Variance Reporting Properties.

When you use the @VAR or @VARPER functions, Essbase shows a positive variance if the actual values are less than the budget values. For example, in Sample.Basic, the children of Total Expenses are expense items. The Variance and Variance % members of the Scenario dimension calculate the variance between the Actual and Budget values. See Figure 115, Variance Example.

Figure 115. Variance Example

This image shows an outline that illustrates calculating variances, as described in the text preceding the table.