Loading the PerformancePoint Planning Account Dimension

I’ve been setting up some PerformancePoint Planning demonstrations for both clients and internal knowledge transfer.  As part of these demonstrations I’ve been loading the Account Dimension from CSV files.

There are several other ways of loading data into PerformancePoint planning dimensions and models and I’ll no doubt post about the alternatives in the future.

There is a small gotcha that I’d thought I’d share.  The pre-defined Account Dimension contains a member property called Account Type.  This member property utlises a lookup table for the various built-in account types such as Unit, Expense etc.

The PerformancePoint CSV format requires that the first row contains the field (or rather member property) names, and optionally data types, with the remaining rows that actual data.  This is slightly different for the Account Type member property, as this is a lookup field, you need to specify the key field name instead, in this case, AccountTypeMemberId.

With that known, you would be forgiven in thinking that, in order to load data against that field, you need to specify the actual AccountTypeMemberId.  However, that would result in a new member property being created called ‘AccountTypeMemberId’ that contains the value and not the description.  The proposed destination field Account Type would be left unpopulated.

Instead, to correctly load the member property, rather than use the Id, you need to specify the actual description from the lookup table.  (Not the only un-intuitive feature of PerformancePoint Planning!)