Use dimensions to track and view business activity by department, cost center, or purpose.
Ledger accounts provide one way of collecting and tracking data about your organization's operations. Dimensions provide another way of categorizing, viewing and analyzing operations. Microsoft Dynamics AX includes three dimensions: Department, Cost Center and Purpose.
You can define as many values for these dimensions as needed to describe cover your operations. You can combine group dimensions in sets and define rules and hierarchies that control what you can post to accounts that are assigned to the dimension sets. For example, dimension values for departments might include the Administration, Production, Purchasing, and Sales departments.
You also can set up set up dimension hierarchies that include rules to help ensure that transactions are posted in ways that make sense for your business, and to prevent posting to combinations of dimensions that aren't logical for your organization. For example, hierarchies can be set up to allow posting to cost center accounts for production operations, while also prohibiting posting to a cost center that tracks administrative expenses. These restrictions can be applied to ledger accounts or specific journals.
When working with dimensions, setup tasks should be completed in the following order: dimension sets, dimension hierarchies and dimension set rules.
The following topics provide information about setting up dimensions:
Dimension sets and dimension set hierarchies
