One use of reference numbers is to establish an alternate hierarchical reporting structure.

Using reference numbers as an alternative reporting structure is not the same as using an alternate organizational structure. See "Alternate Organizations" later in this topic for more information.

In Costpoint, you accumulate and track costs using accounts, organizations, projects, and, optionally, reference numbers. When you define the hierarchical structure of your organizations, consider the company levels and the detail that you want financial statements to reflect. Often, however, companies want their financial reports to be able to reflect multiple scenarios or multiple structures. In some cases, you can build the structures into the levels of your organizations. You can then generate the financial reports that summarize data at different organizational levels.

However, in other situations, building alternate reporting structures into the levels of your organizations may not be advantageous or even possible. In that case, you can use reference numbers to establish an alternate reporting structure. You can then generate financial statements and other financial reports by alternate reporting structure and summarize information at various levels in that structure.

To use this feature, you define a structure for one of the reference numbers and link account/organization combinations to that alternate structure. Alternate structures can have multiple levels within the 20-character limit of the reference field. You can link account/organization combinations to multiple alternate structures if that is necessary to meet your reporting requirements. When you generate financial reports for the alternate reporting structure, balances from account/organizations that you linked to the selected alternate structure are included in those reports.

It is important to keep alternate reporting in mind as you set up your organizations. If you know of groups, regions, cost centers, and so on, that may require alternate reporting, those elements must exist in your organization structure. You cannot use alternate structures to report costs at lower levels than you track through your account/organization setup. For example, suppose you have a three-level organizational structure, with level one the overall company level. You use level two to differentiate business segments and level three to track costs by region. Each region covers multiple states or provinces. If you want to generate financial reports by state or province using an alternative reporting structure, you cannot do it because there is no level in the organization structure to identify costs at that level. In this situation, you need to use reference numbers for data entry to track costs by state or province.

However, you can use alternate reporting to roll up or summarize costs at a higher level. You use organizations to track costs at three levels: business segment, region, and office. If a director manages more than one office, you can set up an alternate reporting structure to group offices by director and print financial reports for each director. In this case, you can also group the offices by a different alternate reporting structure to print reports by state/province, as desired in the previous example. Reporting by state/province is possible because each office is located in only one state/province.