If the store's financial year begins outside of January, sales trajectories can still be compared between the current and last financial years.
You can add some calculations to Analytics to organize this.
Start by pulling up your sales by month for the past 36 months.
- Next, locate the Sale Completed Month from your report, and change it to your Financial Month.
- From the date functions discussion, you can use the
add_monthsfunction.Add_monthsrequires two arguments: how many months forward, and which months you're looking at. As an example, the start of your financial year is May. What you need to do is add the months to May that make it January. If you think backwards, December needs one month added to be January. November needs two. May needs eight.
Then, the months you want to start from are the Sale Completed Month.
Save, and the report displays the redefined financial month.
Next, you want to read the results for a year. To start this, extract the year.
From the Financial Month, copy the calculation.
Paste the calculation into the Current Financial Year.
Click Save. The report displays the information as you need.
Finally, click Save As New.
Next, for example, you want to use Analytics to view the details for the year 2019 in this model, but that would mean that you would need to adjust it for the next financial year. Instead of defining this year, what you want to do is look for the highest year from the available Financial months.
You can do this by using the Large function from our Math functions.
You want to look at the Financial Year.
Find the largest timestamp.
Click Save. The largest timestamp will be in position one.
Also, you could proactively create a new calculation to pull up the previous Financial Year.
Click Save, and the report will pull up the previous Financial Year.
Next, click Save As New.
Next, you can turn these years into dates. Using Date calculation, you can recreate dates that are somewhere on the list, and then organize them the way you want.
The Date function requires three arguments: the year, the month, and the day.
Copy the calculation for This Financial Year into the year position, use the row() function to define the month (month one will be row one, month two will be row two, and so on). Finally, you can define the day as the number 1.
I've created two of these now, one for This Financial Year and another for Last Financial Year.
Click Save, and the table for recreated years will read the results.
So now, you have the framework to match+index the sales totals from the default sorting to our desired sorting.
Start by matching the Financial Year-Month (column 6 above) to the Financial Month (column 2 above). Start building the calculation.
Copy and paste the Financial-Year-Month calculation.
Then, copy and paste the first Financial-Month calculation. In this example, a second calculation to find the rows for the previous financial year is also included.
Now, when you click Save, the rows that correspond to our Financial Months for this Financial Year and Last Financial Year display.
And then using the Match function, you can pull from the Sale Line Totals.
Each corresponding value for the Financial year.
Click Save.
When you do it for both years, the values displayed are being pulled from your report into the right order
From here, all you need to do is aesthetic edits. You can display what this looks like on a visualization.
Next, hide everything except the last two columns.
Then, copy the Last Financial Year calculation, but replace the -1 with -2
Then, click Save.
It pulls up the corresponding months' results into the format that you want. There are lots of ways you can customize this report further, looking at running totals, looking at daily versions, and adding a goal for growth.