Using dimensions – Runway Help Center

Understanding dimensions

Dimensions add details to drivers

Drivers are the main building blocks of your business model—the metrics and KPIs you track regularly.

Dimensions are subcategories or tags for these drivers. They help you structure your business model so you can slice and dice data easily, at any level of granularity, within a few clicks. No need to create pivot tables to summarize your data, or use lookup to map values anymore. Dimensions help you cut down on mapping and modeling time.

Both drivers and dimensions are accessible across your entire model.

Dimensions help you go granular

Dimensions are named collections of values, where each individual value is an attribute. Add them to your drivers to construct granular models in Runway.

For example:

You could break down the driver ‘Expenses’ by adding a ‘Team’ dimension.

The ‘Team’ dimension could be a collection of these values or attributes: {Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Product}.

Next, you could create a granular model where the ‘Expenses’ driver is broken down by the ‘Team’ dimension. In Runway, that would replace the aggregate ‘Expenses’ row in your model with a set of new rows, one for each value of ‘Team’ added to your model.

You’d then see expenses for Sales, Marketing, Engineering and Product Teams listed separately in that new set of expanded rows.

Dimensions vs. drivers

We recommend using drivers for the key variables of your business model, and adding subcategories to these variables using dimensions.

It’s important to avoid going too granular with drivers. For example, say your business operates in the US, Canada and UK.

You could break down the ‘💸 Revenue’ driver by creating a ‘Region’ dimension, containing the attributes ‘US,’ ‘Canada’ and ‘UK.’ This would let you use the aggregate ‘💸 Revenue’ driver anywhere in Runway, and expand it by ‘Region’ where needed.

If you create separate drivers for ‘💸 US Revenue,’ ‘💸 Canada Revenue’ and ‘💸 UK Revenue,’ your formulas would become complicated. Instead of just using the aggregate ‘💸 Revenue’ driver, you’d now have to remember all your regional revenue drivers and make sure you include all of them.

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Keep your drivers broad and your dimensions specific.

Working with dimensions

Identifying a dimension

In Runway, dimensions are denoted by an arrow pointing up and to the right ↗️.

Seeing a list of all dimensions

The full list of dimensions can be found in Settings → Dimensions.

Using an existing dimension to segment data

Adding dimensions to your drivers lets you quickly build out models in Runway. Let’s take the total monthly cost in our ‘Employees’ database and create a model to segment it by the ‘Role’ dimension.

Follow these steps to build out the model using the ‘Role’ dimension:

In the Headcount model, add a driver called ‘Salaries and Wages’ to aggregate the Total Monthly Cost.

In the formula column next to this new driver, sum the ‘Total Monthly Cost’ from the Employees database. Next, filter this formula based on one of the values of the ‘Role’ dimension (’Account Executive’ in this case) by clicking on the white pill in the formula and adding a rule where ‘Role’ is ‘Account Executive.’

Then click on the driver name to add a matching attribute to the driver. Search for the dimension name (’Role’ in this case) and select the dimension value (’Account Executive’ in this case) that matches the formula. You now have a driver and its formula filtered by the ‘Role’ dimension.

To expand this filter to the remaining values of the ‘Role’ dimension, just click the 6 dot menu to the left of the formula and select Dimensions → Expand by dimension→ Role. Runway will automatically expand the ‘Salaries and Wages’ driver, segmented by the remaining values of the ‘Role’ dimension.

Creating a new dimension

Dimensions get added through data integrations, but you can also create new ones from scratch.

For example, say you want to create a ‘Bonus Tier’ dimension that’ll let you calculate bonuses based on seniority. You can do that in 3 different ways:

From within a database, you can add new dimensions by clicking on + → Add Dimension. Next, type in the name of your new dimension and press enter.

From a model page, right-click a driver and select Dimensions → Add Dimensions.

You can also click the icon (with your initial) at the top right and select Settings. From the Settings menu, select Dimensions → Add Dimension.

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Once you’ve entered the formula for the first dimensional driver, you can copy it using Cmd/Ctrl + C and paste it into the other dimensional drivers using Cmd/Ctrl + V. The dimension will be reflected in the new formulas.

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