Building budget solutions using writeback

Many companies implement budgeting solutions using tools such as Excel. While this can be very flexible and easy for users to use, they come with a big drawback—you have a hard time comparing actual figures from your data warehouse with budget figures from the Excel solution. Analysis Services and Excel 2010 contains a solution to this in the form of a function called writeback.

Write-back allows users to type in values in a client application and allows Analysis Services to perform calculations and write the values back to a database. This is something that can be used to implement budgeting solutions that can be used by hundreds and even thousands of users.

To implement a write-back solution in Analysis Services, perform the following steps:

1. Open up the Adventure Works DW2012.dsv Data Source View file.

2. Right-click on the designer and choose Add/Remove Tables:

   

3. Add the FactSalesQuota table to your Data Source View.

4. Create a relationship between the following...