Custom Fiscal Calendar? 445? 554? Or 454? We got you covered with clicks, not code!

As we know Einstein Analytics is the best Business Intelligence and Analytics product for your CRM. I am the product Manager for Enterprise features. My focus is on figuring out all of the most painful pieces of a Business Intelligence or Einstein Analytics implementation for Enterprises and just automagically trying to put it in the product for you in clicks. Some of which you may have already set this up in CRM. 

Simple right?

The first cab off the rank is Custom Fiscal Calendar!

We are working on some others such as:

• Multi Currency
• Multi Language
• Faster data

More detail coming soon, but for now – Custom Fiscal Calendar. 

For years customers have been having to do the painful work of building out solutions in Einstein Analytics to handle the custom fiscal reporting requirements for their company. 

Having implemented many for customers for example a 445 Custom Fiscal Calendar in Einstein Analytics for a large Enterprise retail customer in APAC – I feel your pain! I’ve seen solutions including: 

• Apex classes with SOQL Queries. 
• Fiscal Calendar Tables made in ETL and Datasets. 
• Fiscal Translation on CRM and stored in fields on Salesforce
• Extraction of data out of CRM, modeled and pushed back in. 

I could go on, but let’s not. 

In this release (Winter 21), we are going to make Custom Fiscal Calendar for Einstein Analytics generally available (GA). 

That’s right, we finally have it!. 

The customers who signed up for our pilot and are actively using it are in ❤️. They have provided some really good feedback, which was helpful for us to make it GA. We wanted to avoid the complex solutions and instead make it simple for you to turn on – so let’s look at the steps you need to complete to use the Custom Fiscal Calendar. 

Turning on Custom Fiscal Calendar for your Salesforce org

First, we want to enable Custom Fiscal Year for your org. In setup, search for “Fiscal Year” using the quick find, click it and you will be given the following message. 

Note: You can skip setting up custom fiscal calendar in CRM if this is already turned on for your org. 

Click on “Custom Fiscal Year” and you will be asked to choose a template for your preferred Custom Fiscal Calendar – you can choose to adjust this later on manually if required. 

Click Continue.

You will then be asked to define a custom fiscal year record. This record is for a specific year. 

Choose: 

• Fiscal Year Start Date
• Fiscal year Name
• Week Start Date. 
• Check Advanced Customisation – However this is going to be based on the Template you chose in the previous step. 

Note you will need to follow this step for all previous years that you have data in your Salesforce org. If you don’t have this, we will default to a Gregorian calendar for the missing years, when you filter on them in Einstein Analytics. 

Note: Official documentation for custom fiscal calendar in Salesforce can be found here.

Turning on Custom Fiscal Calendar for Einstein Analytics

Once this is done, we are ready to enable it in Einstein Analytics. Jump to the Analytics Settings page in Setup – you’ll find it under the Analytics tab on the left in Salesforce setup menu. 

You will notice that we have a new option: “Custom Fiscal Year Support in Einstein Analytics”. To turn it on all you have to do is check the “inherit the custom year defined in Salesforce setup” box. And of course, remember to save the new selection.

That’s it! I told you it was simple.

You now need to run all your data flows to make use of the Custom Fiscal Calendar. When the data flows run, the fiscal definitions in Salesforce will be pulled into Einstein Analytics and apply them to the dates that are in your datasets. 

When they have finished running you will be able to go into your dataset and see the Fiscal Option when you go to apply a group or filter.

Written by