Reporting on Aggregate Totals

Typically my reports and dashboards need at least two levels of granularity (more than simply aggregate totals), but I’m finding myself in need of exactly that.

I’ve been tasked with creating an executive report comparing profit over various time frames. I don’t need to see that profit broken out by any deeper data segments for this report, just high level analysis over various periods.

The modes available for ‘Sales Summary’ don’t appear to meet my need to be able to display aggregate totals over different slices of time in the same query, and while I know exactly how to get what I want in Custom Mode, I can’t seem to get Custom Mode to work with Sales Summary.

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated, thanks!

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I believe you need to select a dimension to use custom mode. However, you should be able to accomplish your needs by simply selecting the appropriate profit measure from the ‘measures’ menu and selecting the time period you want to capture from the ‘Periods’ menu. Keep the mode set to Period

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I appreciate the attempt but I’m familiar with all of those steps.

For instance, here are the desired columns.

2020 Month to Date Profit | 2019 Month to Date Profit | Variance | 2020 February Profit | 2019 February Profit | Variance

One way that I see this as being done, and perhaps I need to re-frame my approach, would be to use Time as a dimension. Is that possible?

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Mike is correct, you’re looking for Custom mode.

When you create a column in custom mode you can pick a period, so when you set up you’re column for 2020 Month to date profit you go to the period tab in the popup and create you’re month to date period. repeat for your other columns

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Hi there! May I suggest a dashboard to accomplish your summary along with summary numbers? Here’s my example dashboard. I tried to leave enough for you to see what I want to bring up:

Some points:

  • You can have JUST your summary numbers, rather than anything further.
  • For the variances, you can set colors (red, yellow, green) for when profits are up or down. This helps in making it easy for your executives to identify whether the company is up or down.
  • So, in my example, I have summary YTD numbers for sales$ and #orders, which show up in blue. Then, below each I have their YTD year-over-year increase/decrease, which have settings for red/yellow/green based on whether they are up or down from the same time last year.

Hope this helps!