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Most finance teams understand dimensions. They’ve implemented them. They use them. They rely on them for reporting, budgeting, and oversight. 

The problem isn’t understanding what dimensions are. 
It’s knowing how many to use, how to use them well, and how to keep them working as the organization changes. 

Some organizations create too many dimensions and values, and consistency slowly erodes. Coding drifts. Reports still run, but confidence drops. Others create too few, and reporting pressure gets pushed back into the chart of accounts, spreadsheets, or manual explanations. In both cases, the structure technically works…but it doesn’t work well. 

That’s the gap between having dimensions and optimizing them. 

After working with finance leaders across nonprofits and the public sector — and through conversations like Sparkrock’s recent thought leadership webinar on dimensions with Meg Wilson, Jennifer Hume, and Kinley Graham — a clear pattern emerges. The organizations that get real value from dimensions don’t just implement them once and move on. They manage them deliberately, with the same discipline they apply to budgets, controls, and governance. 

High-performing dimension structures are defined by habits; repeatable decisions about design, use, and upkeep that keep the structure clean, usable, and defensible over time. 

So here are our team’s seven habits — the practical moves that keep a dimension structure usable, trusted, and scalable. 

1. They Start With Governance Needs, Not Reporting Wants 

If you design dimensions around the reports people ask for, you’ll rebuild your structure every time someone asks a better question. 

High-performing teams start somewhere more durable: governance. Because governance doesn’t change every quarter — and when it does change, it changes for reasons you can defend. 

Before anyone debates “how many dimensions,” strong finance leaders get painfully clear on: 

• Delegated authority: who is allowed to approve spend, at what thresholds, and under what conditions? 

• Accountability: who owns the budget, and who gets asked to explain variances when the numbers don’t match expectations? 

• Audit expectations: what controls need to be enforced by design, not patched after the fact with review and cleanup? 

Those questions aren’t theoretical. They show up in audit management letters, board meetings, and funder conversations, and they’re exactly where messy dimension structures get exposed. 

This is why reporting has to follow governance, not the other way around. 

When dimensions are anchored in approval authority, spending limits, and budget ownership, reporting becomes a natural output of the structure, not a separate project that relies on workarounds, “special” accounts, or someone in finance who knows how to interpret the mess. 

And in the webinar, this was one of the clearest themes: getting governance right up front is what stops dimension sprawl before it starts, because you’re building the structure around how the organization is managed, not how the latest report is formatted. 

2. They Treat Naming Conventions as a Control Mechanism 

Naming conventions sound like admin work, until you see what happens when you don’t have them. 

In a dimensional structure, naming is one of the few controls that reaches everyone: finance, program leaders, approvers, and anyone coding transactions. If names are inconsistent or unclear, you get messy data, and messy data turns into messy decisions. 

High-performing dimension structures treat naming like governance, not housekeeping. They build conventions that are: 

• Consistent and predictable (so people don’t invent their own logic) 

• Human-readable (especially for non-finance users) 

• Free of “institutional knowledge” abbreviations only one person can decode 

• Clear on what the value represents without cramming multiple meanings into one code 

Why does this matter? 

Because ambiguity doesn’t cause one big failure. It causes a hundred small ones: 

• Two values that mean the same thing 

• One value used three different ways 

• “Temporary” codes that become permanent 

• Reporting that looks right until you try to reconcile it 

Duplication is where dimension structures start to lose trust. Once you have “almost-the-same” values, you’re no longer tracking reality; you’re tracking how different people interpreted the dropdown. 

Finance leaders who take naming seriously see compounding benefits: fewer miscoding issues, faster onboarding, cleaner approvals, and reporting that holds up over time because the underlying categories are stable and understood. 

3. They Block Old Values Instead of Deleting Them 

Deleting a dimension value feels like tidying up. In finance systems, it’s usually the start of a bigger mess. 

High-performing teams retire dimension values by blocking them, not removing them. Blocking keeps the value available for history and reporting, while ensuring it can’t be used going forward. It’s the difference between clean governance and accidental data loss. 

And this matters in all the places finance can’t afford surprises: 

• Historical reporting stays intact (no broken comparisons, no gaps) 

• Audits don’t turn into archaeology (“what did this used to be called?”) 

• Trend analysis remains reliable across years, grants, and reorganizations 

• Funder reporting stays defensible because past coding remains traceable 

• Finance avoids rebuilding history just to explain today’s numbers 

Jennifer shared in the webinar that this single habit has saved organizations weeks of cleanup, especially when audit or funder questions show up months after decisions were made and staff have moved on. 

A good rule of thumb: 

If it existed, it should remain reportable, even if it’s no longer active. 

Because finance manages today’s coding and the story your data needs to tell over time. 

4. They Are Ruthless About Optional vs. Required Dimensions 

One of the fastest ways to break a dimension structure is to treat every transaction like it needs the same level of detail. 

High-performing teams don’t do that. They make a deliberate call on what’s required for governance and reporting integrity, and what’s optional because it only matters in certain situations. 

They typically separate dimensions into three categories: 

• Always required: the fundamentals that anchor accountability (often fund, department) 

• Contextual: the dimensions that only apply when relevant (grant, project, individual) 

• Temporary: time-bound needs that shouldn’t permanently reshape your structure (special initiatives, emergency funding, short-term tracking) 

This matters because both extremes create predictable failure: 

Make everything required, and you’ll get: 

• Slower entry 

• More frustrated users 

• More “best guess” coding 

• More corrections later 

Make everything optional, and you’ll get: 

• Inconsistent tagging 

• Unreliable reporting 

• Variance explanations that start with “it depends how it was coded” 

The teams that get this right design with intent. They can explain—plainly—why each dimension exists, who needs it, and when it must be used. That clarity is what makes consistency possible. 

It’s also why strong teams rarely aim for a “perfect” structure on day one. They start with what’s essential, enforce it well, and expand thoughtfully as governance and reporting needs evolve, without turning dimensions into a dumping ground for every new request. 

5. They Align Dimensions to Budget Ownership 

A dimension structure can be technically correct and still fail the moment someone asks, “Who owns this number?” 

If dimensions don’t align to budget ownership, reporting turns into interpretation. Finance becomes the translator. And accountability gets fuzzy; not because people don’t care, but because the structure doesn’t map to how decisions are actually made. 

High-performing teams design dimensions so budget ownership is obvious in the data: 

• Budget owners can see their slice without needing finance to rebuild a report 

• Variance analysis rolls up cleanly to the people who are accountable for results 

• Reporting answers “who’s responsible?” in a way that survives re-orgs, staffing changes, and year-end pressure 

This is the point where dimensions stop being accounting infrastructure and start functioning as a management tool. 

When the dimensional structure mirrors how budgets are owned and managed, finance spends less time explaining what the numbers mean and more time helping leaders act on what the numbers are saying. 

6. They Tie Dimensions Directly to Approval Workflows 

This is where dimensions stop being a reporting tool and start doing real governance work. 

In high-performing structures, dimensions drive what happens next: routing, thresholds, visibility, and exceptions. They determine what gets approved, by whom, and under what conditions. That’s how you move from hoping controls are followed to building controls into the flow of work. 

Well-designed dimensions can drive: 

• Approval routing based on fund, program, department, or location 

• Spending thresholds that reflect delegated authority (and change cleanly when roles change) 

• Access and visibility rules so people see what they’re responsible for (and not what they aren’t) 

• Exception handling (over-budget, restricted funds, special approvals) without relying on manual policing 

The payoff is simple: finance no longer has to review everything “just in case.” The structure enforces policy by design, consistently, every time. 

As Meg described in the webinar, this is the shift from reactive oversight (catching issues after the fact) to designed governance — where controls scale with the organization without adding workload or creating bottlenecks. 

7. They Review the Structure After Audit Season (Not During) 

If you want to see whether a dimension structure is truly working, don’t look at it in the calm of mid-year reporting. Look at it when the pressure is on: year-end close, audit requests, board questions, funder deadlines. 

And here’s the hard truth: the worst time to redesign dimensions is while you’re in that pressure. 

High-performing finance teams treat dimension review as a post-season discipline, not an emergency response. They schedule it deliberately: 

• Right after year-end close 

• After the audit is finished (while findings are still fresh) 

• After major funder reporting cycles 

• When funding models or organizational structures shift 

Then they do what strong finance teams always do: they run a structured debrief. 

They ask: 

• Where did our structure hold up, and where did it create workarounds? 

• Which values were used consistently, and which ones drifted? 

• What did we have to explain manually that should have been obvious in the data? 

• Where did approvals, access, or budget visibility break down? 

The goal isn’t change for the sake of change. It’s targeted maintenance: 

• Block what should no longer be used 

• Refine what’s unclear 

• Add only what you can govern properly 

Dimensions aren’t static — they shouldn’t be. But high-performing teams don’t let them evolve through pressure and exception. They evolve them on purpose, with evidence, at the moment when the organization can actually absorb change. 

The Throughline: Discipline Over Perfection 

What ties these habits together isn’t sophistication. It’s discipline. 

High-performing dimension structures don’t succeed because they’re elaborate. They succeed because they’re intentional and maintained, built around real governance, kept consistent over time, and understood by the people who actually use them. 

At their best, they are: 

• Purposeful: every dimension exists for a reason, not “because we might need it someday” 

• Governed: clear ownership, clear rules, and controlled change 

• Usable beyond finance: coding stays consistent and visibility improves across the organization 

• Able to evolve without breaking: values get retired properly, structures adapt, reporting stays intact 

And they rarely appear fully formed on day one. 

Strong teams start with the essentials, enforce them well, learn through real cycles (close, audit, funder reporting), and improve the structure over time without letting it drift into clutter. 

Want to Go Deeper? 

For more detail and real examples, watch Dimensions in Practice: A Conversation for Finance Leaders with Meg Wilson, Jennifer Hume, and Kinley Graham. It’s a practical walkthrough of design decisions, common missteps, and what “good” looks like when reporting and controls matter.