Descriptive Flexfields (DFF’s)
Budget Wizard allows you to upload and download Descriptive Flexfields for budget headers and lines.
The flexfield icons are available on the product ribbon as a drop-down list when the ‘(..) DFF’s’ button is clicked (as per screenshot below) or when double-clicking in the applicable DFF section on the sheet.
The DFF context column and ONLY DFF Attribute1 and Attribute15 are shown on the sample sheet and in the template. This is to prevent unnecessary clutter. If you want the other columns, close this form and manually create the appropriate columns in your workbook by copying an existing column (e.g. Attribute1), insert it and rename the column header (e.g. Attribute2). Note - There should be no space between the text and number.
During the validation of the workbook the Flexfields will be validated to ensure the compulsory columns are included in your workbook (based on the set up in your instance of Oracle).
This functionality is common to all our tools.
Refer to section:
Deleting Existing Values
If you wish to preserve any DFF values, you MUST have them in the sheet before any uploading is performed.
This is because:
• When you create a budget using ‘Replace’ mode, all existing lines are deleted and new ones created.
• In ‘Edit’ mode, lines may be ignored if there is no change from data on the sheet compared to the actual budget lines.
If a change is indicated, the existing line will be deleted and a new one added to take its place. Therefore, if you have values in the database not represented on the sheet, these will be lost.
Period Phased Budgets
There is only one set of columns for the DFFs, yet you can add dozens of budget lines from a single row in the spreadsheet.
For period phased budgets, the DFF columns are uploaded to every budget line on the row. Therefore, if you wish to load different DFFs for different periods, you need to ensure you use different rows on your spreadsheet for the upload.
For downloading, the SQL retrieves the data for every row, but if it finds differences in the Line Comment or DFFs it puts the values on separate lines to preserve them if the budget is re-uploaded.
