(You can win my latest Excel Dashboard Training kit free, read this post to find out how.)
Over at Jorge‘s ExcelCharts blog, he started a very good discussion on Excel Dashboards: Who needs them anyway?.
Jorge has very good experience designing, working on and teaching about dashboards. So he uses all that skill to gaze in to a crystal ball, to understand who needs excel dashboards and why.
According to him, key features of dashboard users / makers are,
- You are inquisitive & analytical. You want your business to be ahead of others and you know that answers to several lingering questions can be found in data.
- You are oppressed with insight-less BI / DW systems that take 6 months create new reports and 1 year to show meaning. You are angry because your competitor is acting nimble and using data better.
- You find solace in Excel and its simple approach to analysis and discovery. You are forced to learn macros, advanced visualization skills so that you can make powerful dashboards and models.
- You are sensible enough to know that data analysis, visualization & communication skills are what you need to stay competitive in labor market.
While Jorge‘s points are all valid, they also paste a dull picture of Excel based Business Intelligence world. To me the world looks much more awesome. May be because I haven’t got the experience.
What Comes to mind when I think of dashboard users /makers
When I think of someone using Excel / Tableau / R / Access / or some other tool to communicate a story to change the world (world = their department or team or company or school or home), this is what comes to my mind.
- You are inquisitive. You question assumptions, data models and trends. You know that data cannot lie.
- You are analytical. You see some data, and you know what conclusions can be drawn, what hypothesis can be tested and what assumptions can be broken.
- You are realistic. While Tufte and Few might scream from the top of their homes about good data visualization, you know what is possible given your reality. You know that almost everyone hates big changes. So you bring change, one chart at a time.
- You know that selling your story is as important as having it.You know that your dashboards, analysis needs to be wrapped and presented in a great way to get them across.
- You are responsible. You know that it is not your job to make that new report / chart / dashboard. You know IT is paid millions to do it. But you will still do it because you care and feel responsible.
- You are fun. You know that at the end of day sulking will not get you anywhere. So you also relax and take everything with awesome attitude.
But it should not really matter what Jorge or I think of who you are.
So here is a big question.
If you make or use dashboards, please tell us who you are.
Describe your role, responsibility, why you use dashboards, what challenges you are facing and what awesome things you have achieved.
What you get in return
- Each commenter gets 20% discount on my latest Excel Dashboards training kit.
- One lucky commenter gets the dashboard training kit free.
17 Responses to “Budget vs. Actual Profit Loss Report using Pivot Tables”
Good Work, Yogesh & Chandoo! Thanks.
Hi everybody,
first sorry I am late to say something about this topic;actually I was waiting last part
second I am not accountant I am an Engineer
third """"Very Important""" the idea is not about Loss but I am sure it is profit
Based on third it shows:
1- How to use EXCEL
2- How to use pivot TABLES
3- How to collect and arrange DATA
4- How to make reports
Many Thanks
Hi Yogesh and Chandoo,
Thank you for sharing your knowledge!
You guys are great!
thanks chandoo and yogesh, thanks for you lessons, are great!....i have a idea for a budget. I try to do it..... thanks for all
Thanks a lot for sharing the most powerful tool worldwide "knowledge"
Warm greetings from Peru
Hi -
This is a really great article because it's a simple and common thing you'd want to do with a pivot table but not at all obvious how to do it! So - muchas gracias to Chandoo and Yogesh!
One thing - I couldn't get past the group error in the sample file. I would click on ungroup but it didn't seem to have any effect. I'd appreciate it if anybody has any pointers here.
-Juanito
Hi Chandoo
I am also having the group error. Can't seem to ungroup? Appreciate if you explain further on the steps required in order to get to calculated items.
Many thanks and keep up the great work.
Cheers
Adam
Hi Chandoo,
I'm struggling resolving the problem depicted below:
I have a set of data, with (among others) a "Region" field (can be APJ, EMEA, or AMS), and a "Country" field.
Unfortunately, I need to group data by the following 4 Regions: APeJ, Japan, EMEA and AMS.
I first tried to make a pivot with Region and Country in the rows (or columns), and then group Country data as per the above.
Alas, as soon as I have a new Country that appear in my data set, my groupings are broken, and I have to redo the job of ungrouping, grouping etc.
I thought I could try to use calculated item, by adding first a new column to my dataset concatenating Region_Country, and create an "APeJ" calculated item that would sum all the "APJ_*" and substract the "APJ_Japan", but again, no clue, as I can't find a way to use any wild card in those formulas.
Given that I already found extremely helpful tips and tricks in your site that helped me manage that bunch of data, I'm pretty sure you'll have a bright idea on how I can solve that one!
Thanks in advance for your lights!
Hi Catherine...
In such cases, I advice using an additional column in the data itself. You can set-up a grouping table else where with country in first column, region in second column. And then in the data, you can add an extra column and use VLOOKUP to fetch the region based on the country.
Then feed this entire data (with extra column) to pivot table and use the extra column to group the data.
Hi Chandoo,
Thank you for your prompt answer.
I finally came to the same conclusion - after a rest 🙂 . I was probably too tired Friday evening (it was rather late), having spent hours in manipulating all my surveys data so as to pull rolling averages, make nice graphs and so on, and was trying to find a complex solution when there was a simple one.
Thanks again,
Catherine
Hey,
Great post!
I for example have different database structure with the following fields :
Date, Expense, Income, Sum (Income - Expense), Category (Sales, Cost of Goods and etc).
Creating a P&L report for the whole year works great. Including gross margin % and etc.
Though, creating P&L report by QTR/Month is becoming impossible since i get the following error : “This PivotTable report field is grouped. You cannot add calculated item to grouped filed.”
Is there a solution for this kind of problem?
Like Adam and Juanito, I also cannot ungroup.
Would appreciate it if you can add a few more lines and a screenshot or two on where to put the mouse cursor to ungroup.
Hi, I have figured out the ungrouping problem. One of the earlier steps was to group by month, if you pull the month back down to the column then right click and then select ungroup, then pull the month back up so you end up with just data source and budget/actual as the headings, then you can continue on.
To solve the ungroup problem, my method is:
Copy the "data" sheet to a whole new Excel workbook
and directly work on Part 6.
And since it is a fresh copy, Excel don't show me the "can't ungroup" problem. Hope this help.
Thank you Yogesh for this wonderful tutorial.
Kent, Malaysia
Just when i thought pivots were awesome i learn about inserting the calculated fields and that makes them more awesome. chandoo where have you been all my life.
Hello - your P&L pivot version has really impressed my boss and would like to use it. I have applied it for a actual vs budget vs forecast model I have created. One problem. In your variance above the operating profit percent % variance shows 33.8% but I want it to show (0.01) point or the true diff from prior budget.
I know I can add calculation to the side but boss would like to see it in pivot table.
Please help
Thanks
I have a further query which may solve my above dilemma. Is it possible to add a column that calculates percent increase. So in the example above a new column would be added to show variance %.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks