Hi,
It would beneficial to have totals to appear at the top of each hierarchy node once the user has expanded. At the moment when you click on the “+”, you lose the visibility of the total at the top i.e.: Collapsed Hierarchy:
Notice that Node 2 line has no totals, so its difficult for the end user to see the overall total once expanded.
Also, it would be advantageous that once the node is expanded, the totals remain at the top when the user scrolls. So if there were 50 subnodes, Node2 and its totals would remain at the top as the user scrolls down.
One of the reasons the feature was originally designed without subtotals was in preparation for a potential future improvement - in-line charts (which might look something like the attached image).
Our research showed that the charts were simpler and easier to interpret without the subtotal.
I will pass this feedback to the end user. As they are finance orientated, I may be back as they are numbers people. I like the inline charts approach, but would be nice to have a switch to provide both options?
@JonKemp inline charts are still in the design stage - they haven’t been placed onto the road map yet, so I unfortunately don’t have a specific release date.
I was told that the design of the grid in Phocas meant that sub-totals were not possible.
This is quite a floor as essentially Phocas is to many a Pivot-Table and therefore forces people to continue to use Excel for this sort of report.
The inline chart is a good idea but really I’d rank sub-totals higher in priority and don’t see how it woudl make any difference with how they’re represented here as it’s just a graphical representation of the number to the left of it.
Once the sub-totalling works, you could then look to introduce inline charts that understand where they are in the heirarchy, eg only show on sub-totals in relation to the Grand Total, only show on child rows relative to their parent etc.
I have got feedback from our finance team, they have stressed the importance that numerical value is a must than subtotals in graph form. Although a bar would show direction in travel, the finance team NEED the number. Being bipartisan, I see the merit of inline graphs like below, however for financial reporting it should just be hard numbers.
Not to railroad the specific requirements of numbers, I would like to expand on the inline charts, What our business would want above all others would be inline traffic lights. i.e. Products this year versus last year.
Imagine the above is a list of products with the sales comparing this year with last year. The maths would be:
Specific product sales Current Year (CY) / specific product sales Prior year (PY)
A CY product sales is 200 and the product sales PY is 400, this would mean this product is selling at 50% which would be Red, however, if it was selling at 110% it would be green.
To resurrect this post. I have been in consultation with the other European branches recently and the common request (around 50 senior users of Phocas) has been the need subtotals to be present on nesting when the node has been expanded, when suggesting an inline graph image none of them accepted this as an alternate option.
Please can this be reviewed again at your earliest convenience.
