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Earlier this year, we hosted a thought leadership webinar called Dimensions in Practice: A Conversation for Finance Leaders. It was a candid conversation led by Meg Wilson, Jennifer Hume, and Kinley Graham; three people who have spent years on the nonprofit finance side of the table, accountable for audits, funder reporting, board questions, and system decisions that had real consequences. 

What stood out wasn’t a specific configuration or best practice. It was how often the conversation came back to the same point: dimension redesigns don’t usually fail because the structure is wrong. They fail because the right conversations didn’t happen first. 

Most redesigns start with good intentions. Cleaner reporting. Fewer workarounds. Better controls. The structure looks solid on paper. Everyone signs off. And six months later, the same questions resurface — just shifted into a different report, a different workaround, or a different person’s inbox. 

As Kinley Graham often reminds teams, the success of a dimension structure is determined long before anything is configured. It’s determined by whether finance has pressure-tested the design against the people, obligations, and edge cases that will stress it the most. 

Before you redesign your dimensions, here are eight conversations experienced finance leaders insist on having, because they’ve seen what happens when they’re skipped. 

1. The Auditor Conversation: Where Does the Structure Break Under Scrutiny? 

Auditors don’t care how elegant your dimension model is. They care whether someone else can follow it and get the same answer. 

This conversation isn’t about asking auditors what to build. It’s about understanding where your current structure forced explanations instead of providing answers. 

Ask: 

• Where did we rely on manual review because the system couldn’t enforce controls? 

• Which dimensions or values required clarification during testing? 

• Where did historical consistency become an issue? 

• What information was hardest to trace across periods? 

If your redesign doesn’t reduce audit friction, it hasn’t solved the right problem. 

Jennifer has shared repeatedly that many dimension cleanups are triggered not by reporting requests, but by audit fatigue — the slow realization that finance is compensating for structural gaps year after year. 

2. The Funder Conversation: Where Does External Reporting Bend Your Structure? 

Funder reporting is where dimension decisions stop being theoretical. 

This conversation surfaces where internal logic and external expectations collide: 

• Which funders require reporting cuts that don’t align to your fiscal year? 

• Where do definitions differ from how you manage internally? 

• Which reports require rework every cycle? 

• What information do you track “on the side” because the system can’t handle it cleanly? 

Experienced finance teams know this truth: if your dimension structure can’t support funder reporting directly, pressure will always leak back into the chart of accounts or spreadsheets. 

That’s not a failure of staff. It’s a signal the structure isn’t doing enough work. 

3. The Board Conversation: Where Does Meaning Get Lost? 

When boards ask for more data, what they’re really asking for is more confidence. 

This conversation is about identifying where the current structure obscures accountability or intent: 

• Which reports generate the most follow-up questions? 

• Where do explanations take longer than they should? 

• What decisions feel hardest to support with the information provided? 

If board reporting relies heavily on interpretation, your dimensions aren’t carrying enough meaning on their own. 

Meg often frames this as a clarity test: if finance has to narrate every report, the structure is doing too little.

4. The Budget Owner Conversation: Where Accountability Breaks Down 

If dimension redesign is done in isolation, budget ownership is usually the first casualty. 

Talk to budget owners about how they actually interact with the numbers: 

• How do you know whether you’re on track? 

• What do you look at when something feels off? 

• Where do reports not reflect how you manage day to day? 

This conversation often reveals a disconnect between how finance thinks about structure and how managers experience it. When dimensions don’t map cleanly to ownership, finance becomes the interpreter and accountability weakens. 

High-performing teams design dimensions so responsibility is visible without explanation.  

5. The Program Lead Conversation: Where Coding Decisions Drift 

Program teams don’t break dimension structures maliciously. They break them unintentionally. 

This conversation surfaces friction that doesn’t show up in reports: 

• Which values feel ambiguous? 

• Where do people guess? 

• Which dimensions feel redundant or confusing? 

• What slows people down at the point of entry? 

These insights are critical for refining required vs. optional dimensions. Ignore them and consistency erodes over time, leaving finance to clean it up. 

6. The Multiple Year-End Conversation: Where Time Works Against You 

Many organizations operate across multiple reporting realities: 

• Government funding 

• Restricted grants 

• Different fiscal or program cycles 

Ask: 

• Which reports don’t align to your fiscal year? 

• Where do you manually adjust or reconcile periods? 

• How do overlapping reporting timelines impact analysis? 

This conversation often explains why “clean” structures still require manual intervention. Ignoring it almost guarantees that your redesign will look right internally but fail under external reporting pressure. 

7. The Post-Mortem Conversation: What Actually Hurt Last Cycle? 

Before redesigning anything, review the evidence: 

• Audit findings and management letters 

• Board questions that required follow-up 

• Reports that took longer than expected 

• Explanations that relied on “because that’s how it’s coded” 

Keep the focus on spotting repeat issues and what they’re telling you. 

Kinley often emphasizes that good dimension design is retrospective before it’s prospective. If you don’t learn from the last cycle, you’ll rebuild the same pain into the next one. 

8. The Finance Team Reality Check: What Only You Know 

Finally, have the conversation most teams avoid. 

Ask: 

• What do we fix manually every month? 

• Where do we rely on institutional knowledge? 

• Which rules exist only because “we know how this works”? 

• What would break if someone new joined tomorrow? 

This is where sustainability lives. If your structure depends on memory instead of design, it won’t scale, no matter how clean it looks on paper. 

Why This Work Comes Before Design 

Dimension redesign seems like a configuration exercise, but it is more of a governance exercise. 

Skipping these conversations produces structures that look thoughtful but collapse under pressure. Having them upfront produces structures that: 

• Enforce control instead of requiring cleanup 

• Align reporting to accountability 

• Survive audits and board scrutiny 

• Evolve without constant rework 

This is also why planning tools matter. Checklists don’t replace expertise; they create space for it. They make sure the hard questions are asked before decisions are locked in. 

A Final Thought 

If redesigning your dimensions feels urgent, that’s usually a signal that something is already broken. 

The temptation is to move quickly. But the finance leaders who get this right slow down just enough to listen to what the last cycle revealed through audits, board discussions, and funder reporting. Then they redesign with confidence, knowing the structure they’re building reflects how the organization actually operates, not how they hope it will. 

To support that process, we created a set of dimension planning checklists based on the same conversations discussed in the webinar. They’re designed to help finance teams capture input, surface trade-offs, and work through these discussions deliberately before any changes are locked in. 

If you’re preparing to revisit your dimension structure, the checklists are a practical place to start.