Dimensions

What is a dimension?

In accounting systems, financial transactions like purchase orders and invoices need to be properly categorized for reporting and compliance. Transactions are assigned to specific GL accounts, departments, locations, projects, and other organizational segments based on a company’s accounting rules.

Ottimate represents these transaction classifications through dimensions. Each dimension consists of:

Examples

GL Account coding: If a company codes office equipment purchases to GL Account 3421 “Furniture & Equipment” in their ERP, this appears in Ottimate as:

Location coding: If the same purchase is assigned to a specific location like “Boston Office”, another dimension is assigned:

Dimensions can be applied at both the invoice header and item level. A single transaction can be coded with multiple dimensions, allowing for detailed multi-dimensional reporting that matches your accounting system’s structure.

In the following image, we illustrate how dimensions appear in the Ottimate UI.

Supported Dimension Types

The following types of dimensions are commonly fetched from client ERP systems and stored in Ottimate for coding. We include the comparable ERP entities for reference.

GL Account

A GL Account (General Ledger Account) classifies how a transaction will be recorded in the company’s general ledger. For example, coding office supplies to an “Office Expense” account.

Location

Represents geographic locations like offices, facilities, warehouses, or divisions within a company.

Department

Represents internal business units or functions within a company.

Project

Used to track transactions related to a specific initiative, job, or capital effort.

Task

Represents specific tasks within a project for detailed tracking.

Cost Type

Used for categorizing different types of costs within projects.

Item

Represents goods and services purchased from vendors.

Fetching dimensions from Ottimate

For supported ERPs, Ottimate automatically retrieves accounting dimensions. You can fetch the list of dimensions that Ottimate has synched from the accounting system with the dimensions API. For a list of supported operations and query parameters, see dimensions.

Sample Request

In this cURL example, we fetch all dimensions associated with a company in Ottimate.

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curl https://api.ottimate.com/v1/dimensions \
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     -H "X-Api-Key: <apiKey>"

Response

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{
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  "version": "1.0.0",
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  "total_count": 100,
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  "page": 1,
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  "limit": 20,
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  "dimensions": [
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    {
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      "id": "dim_VOH21Up3M7HV",
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      "name": "Sales Account",
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      "type": "Account",
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      "erp_dimension_id": "ext_sales_001",
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      "dimension_type": "account",
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      "ottimate_company_id": 15196
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    }
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  ]
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}

Where id is the Ottimate assigned identifier for this specific dimension value, and erp_dimension_id is the ERP assigned identifier.

See /v1/dimensions for a complete list of functionalities and additional examples.