The Allocation Review stage

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated August 1, 2024
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of The Allocation Review stage

    The Allocation Review stage in ServiceNow's financial allocation process enables you to thoroughly review your allocation setup before processing. It provides a comprehensive overview of how expenses are assigned and allocated across segments, ensuring accuracy and completeness prior to running allocations.

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    Key Features

    • Allocation Setup Review: Summarizes key allocation details, including:
      • Bucketing: Percentage of expenses assigned to buckets during the Bucketing stage.
      • Allocation Setup: Percentage of buckets allocated to accounts within the segment hierarchy.
      • Others: Detailed allocation data such as expense amounts allocated to segments, cleansed amounts, and amounts in assigned/unassigned buckets.
    • Concurrent Allocation Runs: Queue multiple allocation jobs for various cost models and fiscal periods simultaneously, supporting multiple users on the same instance.
    • Job Management: Ability to cancel ongoing jobs or dequeue pending jobs to optimize engine runtime and resource use.
    • Run Details and Analysis: After allocation runs, view detailed cost model run information, including links to allocations and unit costs.
    • Views Available:
      • Cost Analysis: Analyze cost lines.
      • Expense Lines: (For upgraded customers with ITBM Analyst license) View GL expense lines generated for cost models created before upgrading to Xanadu.
      • Cost Lines and Breakdowns: See aggregated cost allocations and detailed breakdowns; breakdown lines can be explicitly generated if needed.
      • Unit Costs: Review unit cost details.
      • Cost Tree: Explore hierarchical views of segment accounts contributing to selected accounts, with drill-down capability.
    • Workbench for Corrections: If discrepancies are found during review, you can return to previous stages to make corrections before processing allocations.

    Practical Use for ServiceNow Customers

    This stage is critical for validating allocation configurations and ensuring data integrity before running allocations. It improves operational efficiency by allowing multiple queued allocation runs, supports collaborative work with multiple users, and provides rich analytical views for financial transparency. Customers upgrading to Xanadu and those with ITBM Analyst licenses gain additional capabilities for expense line visibility.

    By leveraging the Allocation Review stage, customers can confidently finalize their allocation setups, reduce errors, and streamline the financial allocation process within ServiceNow.

    The Allocation Review stage allows you to review the allocation setup before you process the allocations.

    Allocation Setup Review

    On the Review page, these summaries are available:
    • Bucketing: The percentage of expenses that are assigned to buckets on the Bucketing stage.
    • Allocation Setup: The percentage of buckets that are assigned to accounts in the segment hierarchy on the Allocation Setup stage.
    • Others: Detailed allocation information, such as the expense amounts that are to be allocated to segments, the amount that was cleansed in the data cleansing stage, and the amounts in the unassigned buckets and assigned buckets.
    Figure 1. Reviewing an allocation setup
    Reviewing an allocation setup

    Allocation

    You can trigger allocation runs for multiple cost models for various fiscal periods concurrently by queuing the allocation jobs to the allocation engine. This also allows multiple users on the same instance to queue their requested allocation runs. When the allocation engine has completed an allocation run, a confirmation message appears.

    • The engine automatically picks up the next job in queue after the current job is complete.
    • You can queue any number of allocation jobs for multiple cost models and fiscal periods.
    • You can cancel a job (stop the engine) when the job is in progress thereby saving the engine runtime for the next job in queue.
    • You can also dequeue a job from the jobs that are in queue by removing it from the queue, if you do not want to run it.
    With this enhancement, you can view the last run details of the cost model and its breakdown details with links to allocations and unit costs.
    • View on Cost Analysis: View the cost lines for analysis.
    • View Expense Lines: (For customers upgrading from a previous version to Xanadu) If you had enabled the Generate GL Expense Lines check box in the Financial Model form for the existing cost models, then you can view the GL expense lines of the cost model after the allocation engine is run. The GL expense lines will not be generated for the cost models you create after upgrading to Xanadu.
      Important:
      This feature is only available to customers who own an ITBM Analyst license.
    • View Cost Lines: View the cost allocation aggregates.
    • View Cost Line Breakdowns: The cost allocation breakdown aggregates for the cost model. If Run On Demand Only flag is set to true, then the allocation engine does not generate breakdown lines. To explicitly generate the breakdown lines, generate breakdown allocations in the Breakdown Relationships related list of the Financial Model form.
    • View Unit Costs: View the unit costs.

    You can also view the details of the current cost model that is in progress and the total number of allocation jobs in queue. Also, view the current job progress with the status of the current allocation run and its details.

    View Cost Tree: View all the segment accounts contributing to the selected account in a hierarchical view. You can further drill, on each segment account, down in the hierarchy.
    1. Click View Cost Tree.
    2. Select a segment in the Segment choice list.
    3. Select an account from the Account choice list.
    4. Click Go.