Reverse the Sign of Measure Values in Financial Models

You can reverse the sign of measure values for non-root categories if the sign would not otherwise make sense to the intended audience.

For example, your accounting system stores revenue and liability balances as negative values, and expense and asset balances as positive values. You want to distribute reports based on this data to sales managers, who logically expect revenue values to be positive. To accommodate the information needs of this audience, you reverse the sign for revenue values from negative to positive.

Reversing the sign does not affect the value properties, only how they appear in your OLAP reporting component. However, your report users should be advised that sign reversal can alter the results of run-time calculations. We recommend that you state which categories contain reversed signs in the Description box of the Measure property sheet, thereby ensuring that this important information is shared with the appropriate users.

To reverse the sign of measure values for specific categories, you must first identify the measure to be reversed and then select the categories for which the reversal applies.

Procedure

  1. Open the Measure property sheet for the measure whose sign will be reversed and click the General tab.
  2. Select the Reverse the sign check box and click OK.

    This option identifies the measure whose values will be reversed once the target categories have been selected and the cube is generated.

  3. Open the Categories diagram for the dimension containing the categories you want to change.
  4. Open the Category property sheet and click the General tab.
  5. Select the Reverse the sign check box and click OK.
  6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 for each category whose sign you want to change.