Still Using Forecaster

Ugh. It's been 2 1/2 years and we are still using Forecaster. I was going to find a replacement system but due to several factors, it looks like we will develop a system internally, which means I'm stuck with Forecaster for a few more months. My current project is trying to figure out the various dimension rollups. There are several tables named x_SEG0 that appears to contain parent/child relationships. The trick is to figure out which one to use, and how to travel up the rollup tree.

Segments and SQL Server Manager

Here is our segments setup:

Nothing fancy... this matches our dimension setup in Dynamics AX. Forecaster uses Microsoft SQL Server (no surprise there) to store data and if you have SQL Server Manager installed, you can peek at the raw tables. I am using SQL Server 2008R2 Management Studio.

Once you find the right database engine and database, you should see lots of entries under Tables. In our configuration with two segments, Department data can be found in table dbo.M_SEG0, and Account data can be found in table dbo.M_SEG1 (screen cap below):

These specific tables only store segment information. The actual financial data is stored in table dbo.Z_RAW, which has segments and periods as fields.

Since I maintain the segment data manually, I can link directly (or use a pass-through query) to Dynamics AX dimensions to see if there are missing departments and accounts in Forecaster.

Introduction

As part of our company's ERP implementation of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009, we received Forecaster as part of the package. Since I have no other forecasting software (other than Excel) and Forecaster was "free", I've been using it for our monthly forecast process since January.

I'm not sure if anyone else uses this software; when I have issues and search on Google, there are not that many relevant hits. Through some (expensive) consulting help and lots of trial and error, I've discovered a few things about the software and will share them here, in case there are other users out there looking for answers.

Version info: