We’re thrilled to launch CostPerform version 2023.2, our second release of 2023! We are highlighting the most important changes and new features in this article. We hope you’re as excited as we are!
Insights
The biggest new feature in this release is our very own Business Intelligence tool, called: Insights. Insights allows you to visualize the data from your Datawarehouse Exports and run reports right in the CostPerform Portal. No need to switch to Power BI or Tableau anymore. You and your colleagues can now create dashboards on top of your dataset and share them in your organization.
If you’ve worked with BI tools before, Insights should be familiar territory. But even if you’re new to this type of tooling, getting started will be a breeze.
Insights offers various visualization elements, such as bar charts, pie charts, KPI gauges and tables. You can configure the data you want to see in a user-friendly manner. Simply select the relevant fields to be displayed and how they should be displayed. Using filters, you can limit the visible data to show only what’s relevant
And we’re not done yet: we’ll keep adding new visualization widgets to give you even more options for finding the best way to display your data.
Performance:
This release offers significant performance improvements in multiple areas. The most noticeable performance gains are in Big Data: the speed of calculating and displaying data, as well as for rollups from Big Data, has been significantly improved. We’ve also improved the progress indication along the way.
Especially when you’re using a lot of formula attributes, you will notice the improvement in model calculation time.
Lastly, we’ve greatly reduced memory usage of rollups and drilldowns for multiple periods or when you have “steps per layer” selected, and for certain elements in ETL chains.
Web service integration:
There are some useful enhancements to the Web Service support in CostPerform. Next to XML and JSON, web services that provide CSV data are now also supported. More ways to import the data you need!
You can now use pagination to retrieve data in batches from web services. This will help you process large amounts of data by preventing timeouts and work within your API’s limits.
When reading data from Microsoft 365/SharePoint, you can now select the Excel file and sheet to import from a list, making it much easier to configure your Web Import Tasks or WebService Readers (ETL).
Configuration has become easier as well. You now have the option to enlarge the input fields in case you need to enter long texts.
We’ve also added (experimental) support for OAuth 2.0 authentication (using the Resource Owner Credentials Flow).
Modelling:
CostPerform can now give you a glimpse into the future. To do so, we have developed the new Extrapolation consolidation option. Using this, CostPerform will estimate future values based on previous periods.
We’ve made formula attributes even more powerful by letting you use the folder structure of your meta model. In your formulas you can now use the sum of all numeric attributes in a specific folder (optionally recursively), or the count of all attributes in a folder.
What’s more:
In total, have 47 new/improved functions and 81 bug fixes in this release. You can find the complete release notes here. Log in to get access.
