Many global organizations have operations in different countries and each country could follow their own fiscal calendars instead of following the standard Gregorian calendar. When you create fiscal calendars, you enable the entities in other locations to collect data according to their own fiscal calendars.

You can create multiple fiscal calendars, including a reporting calendar for global reporting. This reporting calendar must be used in the metric definition and set as the Target calendar. The other calendars, known as Source calendars, are then mapped to the Target calendar.

Consider a parent organization in India with two subsidiaries operating in different countries: the US and Australia. The US government's fiscal year runs from October 1 to September 30, while Australia's fiscal year spans from July 1 to June 30. The parent organization adheres to the Indian fiscal calendar, which is from April 1 to March 31. In this context, metric data is collected according to each country's fiscal year and then aggregated according into the global calendar used for data aggregation. If the metric data for the US is 100 and for Australia is 200, the combined data on the global calendar used by the parent organization would be 300. Here, the US and Australian fiscal calendars are considered source calendars, and the global calendar used by the parent organization is the target calendar.