Recently, I had to make a bunch of panel charts. After wrangling with Excel (and a tiny bit of VBA) to create them, I wondered if we are suffering needlessly by being too loyal to Excel. I switched to R and could create these panel charts in almost no time (well, first I had to learn how to pivot the data using dplyr). Today, let me share the experience.
The scenario – Visualize employee performance ratings
Around July, most companies in NZ have their employee performance reviews (or rem reviews). In August, all this review data is, well, reviewed so managers can decide whether any moderation (curve fitting) is needed and how much hike to offer. To help with this process, you need to first understand what proportion of staff are in each rating category. If you are head of a large company, then naturally, you want to know how this spread looks like at overall level as well as individual business group, branch levels, ie at various hierarchies.
The solution – Panel Charts
One quick and easy way to do this is by making lots of charts.
Enter Panel Charts.
Let’s say you have 80 branches, spread across 10 business groups. Each branch has different number of people. To understand if the ratings are normally spread in a branch, you can make a column chart showing number of people in each rating category. Then to see how this spread looks across the company, simply create 80 charts, one per branch.
Related: Introduction to Excel Panel Charts.
80 Charts – that is not fun!!!
Tell me about it. You might need a strong cup of espresso and right mood for lots of copy pasting.
Or you could use some VBA to do the dirty work for you.
In either case, you are going to waste (and hate) that afternoon.
An alternative – use Sparklines
If you are not in the mood for manic copy pasting, then you could use sparklines to cheat. Once you make 80 sparklines, you can just move them around so they look like an 8×10 grid.
It is still a lot of work, but less annoying than creating 80 charts.
A better solution – use R
If you are familiar with programming (VBA/C or something else) you can quickly learn the basics of R and use simple code to convert raw data to elegant panel chart in almost no time.
OK, show me how.
Watch below video. I explain both Excel sparkline and R approaches. As the process is elaborate (especially the Excel one), I am using video format. See it below or on Chandoo.org channel.
Download the resources – Excel file, R code and CSV
Use below links to download files:
- R code panel-gen.r
- Excel workbook with sparkline panel charts – panel-charts
- Raw data in CSV format – rem-data
Have you used R yet?
R is fun, interesting and challenging. If you have some free time, pick it up. It is free and offers heaps of possibilities for statistical analysis, data science, modeling, visualization, data cleanup and exploration. If you are looking for a book, I suggest R for Data Science by Hadley Wickham and Garret Grolemund.
If you are doing some R programming, please share your experiences and thoughts in comments.
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