Lets say you are responsible for sales of 100s of products (which belong to handful of categories). You are looking at sales of each product in last month & this month. And you want to understand whether sales are improving or declining by category. How would you do it?
Turns out, this is not a difficult problem. In fact, this question is asked every day & answered using Advances vs. Declines chart.
You may have seen this chart in financial newspapers or websites. Shown below, Advances vs. Declines chart tells us how many items have advanced & how many have declined.
When should you use Advances vs. Declines chart?
As you can see, advances vs. declines chart does not give low level details about actual movement of values. Instead, it gives you a sense of what is going on. Use it in below situations:
- To get a feel of how values have changed over time.
- When you are dealing with data that constantly changes (sales, number of customers, defects etc.)
Create Advances vs. Declines chart in Excel
You can easily create this chart in Excel from raw data. Just follow below tutorial.
Step 1: Get the data & arrange it
You need at least 4 columns of data – item, category, previous value, current value
Once we have these, calculate % change in 5th column. Arrange data like below:
Step 2: Calculate Category-wise summaries
First list all unique categories in a column. Then using COUNTIFS formula, calculate the number of products declining & advancing.
The formula to count number of products going down by more than 10% is,
=COUNTIFS(Sales[category], Category name, Sales[% change], “<10%”)
[Related: Introduction to Excel SUMIFS / COUNTIFS Formulas]
Step 3: Calculate % break-ups for the chart
Once all the numbers are calculated, you can easily calculate the % split.
NOTE: Make sure you negate the % values for declines. This will ensure that our chart shows stacked bars on both sides of axis.
Step 4: Create a stacked bar chart from this data
Once all the numbers are in place, just select them and create a stacked bar chart. Your output should look like below:
Step 5: Adjust chart series order if needed
You may notice that, our stacked chart bars are not in correct order. Excel would have plotted <10% and >10% series before <0% and >0% series. To fix this:
- Right click on the chart
- Go to Select Data
- Now, select the series area
- Using up / down buttons adjust the order of series
- Done!
See this demo to understand:
Step 6: Adjust the colors & format the chart
Unleash your creativity and format the chart as you see fit. Make sure you add legend (otherwise the chart becomes very difficult to read).
And you are done!
Download Advances vs. Declines chart template
Click here to download the chart template. Examine the formulas & chart settings to understand this better.
Do you use Advances vs. Declines chart?
I use variations of this chart often in my dashboards & reports. These charts are very concise and present a lot of information about distribution of changes.
What about you? Do you use advances vs. declines charts? How do you create them? Share your experiences & techniques using comments.
Looking to advance your charting knowledge?
If you want to one up your Excel awesomeness quotient & create kick-ass charts, then you are at the right place. Check out below tutorials & see how deep the rabbit hole goes:
- Visualizing tax changes over time using Excel
- Index Charts – to understand change over time
- Use Box plots to understand distribution of values
- Visualize monthly changes using Pivot Tables + Conditional formatting
Recommended: If all these sound exciting, you will incredibly benefit from our Excel School program, where we teach advanced charting & data analysis skills. Click here to know more & join us.
19 Responses to “Free Invoice Template using Excel – Download”
Nice post! Invoicing for the small biz or solo entrepreneur is something I see a lot of interest in. Also there are great templates from http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates
This is awesome.
I would need a little more. e.g. say I generate a Inv. # 1 with all the details. Once done I can click a button all the relevant details gets stored in some table. Further, when i generate a new invoice those details gets stored in same table but just below the previous invoice.
Is their a way to do this?
I did create a solution you are looking for, however its wrapped in a larger 'Medical Scheduler' and it uses VBA, But you can Save, Update, Lookup, Email, Print & Apply Payments to the Invoice.
You are welcome to download it here:https://www.dropbox.com/s/2yvo0o2tgq9quhe/Medical_Massage_and_Salon_Application-Free.xlsm
The Invoice Items are created from the Appt. Types & Service Items table.
I would love all feedback from this
Thank you for sharing. I will definitely have a look at it.
Daily dose of Excel held a competition in 2005 for this same topic
It obtained 9 solutions which are shown:
http://dailydoseofexcel.com/archives/2005/10/27/invoice-app-the-results/
[…] http://chandoo.org/wp/2014/03/19/free-invoice-template/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&a… […]
How can i removed Dollar Sign, As want to use this in india.
Please reply.
Also if possible then can i use Indian Rupee Sign and how?
Hi Chandoo,
Thanks for sharing this invoice template, Let me tell you this template will definitely help me since I got a process to handle where this invoice piece comes. Just a small doubt, can we store all the invoice details in PRODUCT & SERVICES sheet. So that whenever I select an invoice number from invoice sheet I can take print out and I can share it as well. Can we do that?? Since I will be dealing with this on monthly basis.
It would be great if you can help me with this.
Thanks in advance for your help!
Regards,
Gaurang Mhatre
Hi Chandoo,
I was thinking learning excel is quite tuff task but your blog proved me wrong. You made it very interesting. Thank you. Also the template you have provided for Invoice is very helpful to us.
Thanks thanks thanks.. Very helpful. 🙂
Hi i love the speadsheet but would like to ask how do i get it to add the description into the invoice as well
Hi Randy, I tried to download one of your link "https://www.dropbox.com/s/2yvo0o2tgq9quhe/Medical_Massage_and_Salon_Application-Free.xlsm" However, i found the link unavailable. Can you please help me get the new link or can you please send this VBA file on my Email-ID.
Hello Anuj,
Thanks for alerting me to the broken link. This one should work:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/gz89gshex1ad0ex/Medical_Massage_and_Salon_Application-Free.xlsm?dl=0
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Randy
Thank you so much Buddy. will check and revert you soon.
Hi, is there any chance that this can work with the "Products & Service" sheet outside of the Invoice sheet. I create multiple invoice files for the numerous clients. Updating the product sheet for each of them maybe a task. Hence, I want to create a MASTER FILE from which data can be picked up without having to insert new data in each of the invoice files.
Possible? Or am I asking for the moon 😉
Thank you so much for tutorial.
This example can be reviewed for the example of the advanced invoice that made with excel userform :https://youtu.be/Qr-4of-38DI
Good Day
i love this template may i ask if it could be modified to have the following
when you lookup a item code in the next column to the right it brings up the description then the quantity, unit cost, discount and then total otherwise i love the template
Item Code Description Quantity Unit Cost Discount Total
When creating an Invoice template in Excel are you able to utilize the auto row height and wrap feature when the cell is a merged cell? I need to have a number of cells merged together to allow for enough space to type in the description of work performed (lets say cells A-D are merged in each row) however it seems that I am unable to utilize the auto format feature. To work around this I have to manually increase the row height after each entry. Is there a better solution for this? Thank you!