After working on making our costs to Towers (via Vendors) more accurate an issue has arisen mid year:

Our totals are correct but the Tower breakdown is grossly overstated.

The rollup figures on the model are also affected:

I've tried to recreate the figures but am stuck as to where they are coming from - any help would be greatly received

Julie - Can you please take a screenshot of the Allocation logic from Vendors to ITRT?  I think this would be a good place to start.

My guess is the weighting is percentage base and not ratio (aka the scales in R12).  I will be interested to see the image as well.

It's a pretty standard allocation logic really

Julie - Can you see if you can grab shots like the following:

Yeah it looks like you are going to have to concentrate around the Cost Source to Vendors allocation and the weighting you are using for it. 

Can't quite figure out why the Amount on the Vendors Master Data is skewing the cost. I've raised a ticket with support so hopefully I'll have a helpful response to reply with

What is the logic you are using to get from Cost Source to Vendors?

From: All Cost Source

To: Data-based Reference - Do Not Allocate Up

Allocation: Vendor Master Data.Amount - many to many ticked

Can you send a few screenshots of the allocation?  This one is interesting hahaha.

A few screen shots:

The annoying part is that when I trace a line through the model from Cost Source up the correct value appears - something strange happening between Cost Source and Vendors, may have to rethink the weighting option!

I would also look at the granularity of your vendors object and the key.  Sometimes that Many to Many selection could cause an issue.  See if you can get your key to move a little cleaner and that might take care of your problem.

I would also make sure you include a lot of these items in your ticket to make sure they understand exactly what you are looking at. 

The Cost Source to Vendors is the same apart from being weighted by the Amount at Vendors

Think I've found the root of the issue but not the cause as such - the weighted by column of Amount at Cost Source seems to be the culprit - I'll work through to see why it's happening

Okay, glad we could help narrow it down for you.  Let us know what you come up with.

Julie,

I have seen this before with Cost Source to Vendors and then to IT Resource Towers.  I would suggest looking at the keys as Doug suggested.  When I saw this it turned out to be that the CS_Vendor Key contained a various and when the amount (weighting) was applied it created a huge negative number.  The weird thing is that it happened only in Stage, never showed up in Development. I ended up having to increase the granularity of the Cost Source to get rid of the various.   Doug has got you pointed in the right direction with checking all the stuff you checking.

Thanks,

Ryan

There is currently no {Various} on the keys but support have stated that issue seems to be around the weighting as some of the figures (rounded up) are 0 and these causes the figures to be distorted.

Further updates will be sent once we have an exact cause and solution(s)

Thank you for the first update, and I am interested to hear what support will have to say.

Support are still investigating the issue but the work around provided is below:

New column created to ensure a completely unique entry =Supplier&&Cost Pool&&Cost Sub Pool&&Costc&&IT Resource Tower&&{IT Resource Sub-Tower}

New column added for the weighting column to ensure a 0 value is entered if 0 =IF(SUMIF(VID,VID,Final Amount)=0,0,Final Amount)

Does the workaround function the way you were expecting?

We have data flowing and no infinite numbers on the reports, work around is working perfectly at the moment - the support ticket is still open so hopefully will be a fix for all rather than just a silo work around.

Thanks for you advice Doug

No problem at all.  Glad we found a workaround and everything is working correctly.