Fiscal Periods, Tabular Models and Time-Intelligence
I recently had to build a tabular model for a financial application and I would like to share my findings on this topic in this post. Financial applications tend to have "Periods" instead of dates, months, etc. Though, those Periods are usually tied to months - e.g. January = "Period01", February = "Period02" and so on. In addition to those "monthly periods" there are usually also further periods like "Period13", "Period14" etc. to store manually booked values that are necessary for closing a fiscal year. To get the years closing value (for a P&L account) you have to add up all periods (Period01 to Period14). In DAX this is usually done by using TOTALYTD() or any similar Time-Intelligence Function.