Currently in Phocas if you need to compare sales against 2 financial year periods by month, you’re able to do this in Phocas by selecting the variance or period variance mode. However there are times when we need to compare against multiple financial years on a month-by-month basis, which is not possible under the current period variance mode options. You have to download each period separately into an Excel spreadsheet and manipulate your own data to create a graph.
The closest I can get to this is by mapping a custom dimension in the back end of the database and then setting up a custom mode to pull multiple FYs but this only works for bar charts only and not line graphs.
Will Phocas be implementing a way to compare multiple financial year periods by months for more than 2 time periods?
this is basically an example of what i’d want to be able to easily pull from in Phocas without having to individually pull out the years and manipulate in Excel to do this graph.
Sure you can! You will need to create a new dimension called period to pull this off. But here is our DB:
This has the fiscal periods (has to be numeric!) going across and the fiscal years going down.
Create a new dimension in the database (I have this in ALL of mine) called Period or date, then map your fact data to it and voila you have a means of matrixing the dates without using the date range option. You will need to open up the date range to a wide range in my case looking at last 10 years but becuase you are aggregating via two dimensions (which happen to be dates) you can then matix and then chart off them:
