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Re: Fiscal quarters crossing calendar years

 

Seid,

The DHIS2 analytics engine only caters for a limited set of relatively
common data periods, as you know - including the more common financial
quarters (same as standard quarters, but different names) and financial
years (again combinations of standard quarters).

What you need is, as u say, a unique requirement - and the logical way of
handling such unique requirements is to set them up as relative
user-defined periods.

The problem with that up to now is that DHIS2 has not had what I usually
call the "anchor" period concept - i.e. the ability to specify a certain
"anchor date period point" that in turn will determine a range of other
relative user-defined periods.

There are at least to usage scenarios for such anchor dates:
either you can use them simply as an offset to cater for the timelag
between the end of a data capture reporting period and when the data is
available for analysis. We have that scenario in many/most countries: if
you are running a report for the relative period "last six months" on
September 3rd, you do not want a report for April-May-June-July-Aug-Sep
because you don't yet have data for e.g. July and Aug and Sep - so in that
case you specify an anchor date of e.g. 30th June - which will result in
the "last 6 months" report giving you data for Jan-June (where you have
data for all months).

OR you can use them to specify a "fixed" anchor date that conforms to your
financial year/quarters, and then define a range of relative periods based
on that ("current fin quarter", "previous fin quarter" etc).

Lars is working on an "anchor date" construct for 2.21 - I have no other
details, but I suspect you might be able to somehow panel-beat that
construct into something that would work.

That said - a more generic solution for all kinds of "financial" periods,
where the financial year in theory can start at any month, would be that
you use generic names for such financial years/quarters for processing BUT
where the start of the financial year is a relative period offset specified
for each database (for Ethiopia +11 or -2) and the fin period names are
user-defined (displayName). Not sure if that's ever been considered.

Regards
Calle



On 3 September 2015 at 16:19, Seid Hussein <seid.hisp@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> We have a unique requirement here in Ethiopia. We have 13 months with the
> first 12 having 30 days each and the 13th one having 5 or 6 depending on
> leap year. Since data about the 13th month is moved to the first month of
> the next year (even when collected manually), we did not face any problems
> regarding that.
>
> But we are facing a challenge in defining quarters. The fiscal year of
> Ethiopia starts in month 11 of the last year, effectively making quarter I
> happen in two different years. However, DHIS2 does not handle such quarters.
>
> Have any of you faced these kind of challenges in other implementations in
> other countries? If so, how did you handle it?
>
> Your comments and suggestions are appreciated.
>
>
> Regards,
>
>
> Seid,
>
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