I’m looking for a way to make a Period choice based on the Work Days of a calendar for use in a dashboard. My company typically does not have sales on Saturdays or Sundays so using Yesterday for a dashboard period ends up showing no transactions when you review dashboards on Mondays. Is there a way to set up a period where it ignores non-work days such as weekends or holidays?
Hi Victor, what you’re asking for can be achieved by creating a new period type. You can create a file which would need to cover all the data in history, as well as far enough forward that future data will be included.
Using the following link,
https://help.phocassoftware.com/display/userdoc/Set+a+new+period+type
You can see the format of the file that you would need to create, essentially 4 columns;
Name - This needs to be unique, we usually go for something such as ‘Mon - WK50 - 2018’ (if its a daily period)
Start Date - the start of the date range
End Date - the end of the date range
Year - The year the range is in
Using the above you can create a file for each day, Monday to Friday, but where Friday has a start date that starts on the Friday, but ends on the Sunday of each week. This way you will only ever have Monday to Friday in your date range, but should any sale ever get recorded on the weekend it would just fall into the Friday definition. This also means that when this period is then used in dashboards, if set to be offset, the previous 'period 'on a Monday would always then be Friday.
Does this help? This will need reflected in the summarisation of the build, so may need some input from a Phocas perspective to complete the work.
Hi Lee, thank you for the input. I understand what you’re saying.
Is there a way for Phocas to put in a check box when setting up a custom period that if checked, would not include non-working days as long as they were set up that way on your calendar?
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Hi @Victor. I’ve logged a suggestion for the inbuilt day period type to take working days into consideration. We do have query improvements on the roadmap. We’ll let this gather interest and decide whether this suggestion should be included.
With regards to the workaround @anon41607707 has suggested, it sounds like you want to produce a “working day” custom period type based off a working days calendar? This is also a good suggestion. This might be something our support or services team could achieve using a script.
This is something we come up against as well. We have no business on Sunday’s. We have calendar to take this into consideration when working with averages days. It would be nice if this could be incorporated into a period type. Most of our “previous day” metrics are useless (blank) on Mondays!
Hi Will, I was wondering if anything was going on with the working day workarounds you mentioned?
Hi @Victor, you can ask your Phocas account manager to have a working day custom period type created. We’ve not progressed any query improvements work at this stage.