Let’s say you are the people manager at ACME Inc. You are looking staff list for the months – January and February 2017. You see that we had 4,000 employees in Jan and 4,200 employees in Feb. So what is the churn?
- Is it just 200?
- Or is it the sum of people who left and who joined?
- What if you want to find out how many people moved to new designations / departments or groups?
You see, churn is tricky to figure out.
So why not invite the pros? ie Power Query.
Side note: You could also calculate churn in Excel (using formulas) or in SQL (by using long queries and unions with a boat load of joins)
Setting up your data – Churn analysis
The first step is to set up two sets of data (one for each point in time). Make sure that you include only relevant columns. Let’s say we go with below layout.
For the sake of simplicity, let’s call these tables thismonth and lastmonth. You can include the data date columns, but they are not necessary for the analysis.
Define churn
We can categorize churn in to one of these 6 levels.
- New employees
- Exits
- People who moved to a new group
- People who moved to a new branch
- People who moved to a new designation
- No changes
Figuring out the churn – Power Query
Here is the process to calculate the churn using Power Query.
- We create a third query by merging two datasets (thismonth and lastmonth) on employee number as Full Outer join (think of this as A union B in sets – ie any employee present in either months will be included)
- We define a custom column in this new query, called status. It will have
- New employees if emp number is null in last month’s column
- Exit if emp number is null in this month’s column
- New group if thismonth.group <> lastmonth.group
- New Branch if thismonth.branch <> lastmonth.branch
- New Designation if thismonth.designation <> lastmonth.designation
- No changes else
- We delete all rows with no changes (as we are only interested in churn)
- Load this data to Excel
Figuring out employee churn – Power Query lesson video
Since the process is somewhat technical and confusing, I made a video explaining everything in detail. Check it out below.
You can watch this video on our youtube channel too.
Download Example Workbook
Click here to download example workbook. You must have Power Query 2013 or Excel 2016 to customize anything.
More on Power Query
Power Query is awesome. If you haven’t explored its power, check out below tutorials and get started.
- Introduction to Power Query
- Unpivot data quickly with Power Query
- How to import web data to Excel using Power Query
- Recommended training: Power Query by Ken Puls
How do you calculate churn?
As mentioned earlier, we can use either Excel formulas or SQL to calculate churn. If I am only interested in high-level churn (ie entries and exits), I use a simple formula. But for anything more than that, I prefer Power Query or SQL (as PQ is not be available in all versions of Excel)
What about you? How do you calculate and analyze churn? Please share your approach and tips in the comments.
13 Responses to “Using pivot tables to find out non performing customers”
To avoid the helper column and the macro, I would transpose the data into the format shown above (Name, Year, Sales). Now I can show more than one year, I can summarize - I can do many more things with it. ASAP Utilities (http://www.asap-utilities.com) has a new experimental feature that can easily transpose the table into the correct format. Much easier in my opinion.
David
Of course with alternative data structure, we can easily setup a slicer based solution so that everything works like clockwork with even less work.
David, I was just about to post the same!
In Contextures site, I remember there's a post on how to do that. Clearly, the way data is layed out on the very beginning is critical to get the best results, and even you may thinkg the original layout is the best way, it is clearly not. And that kind of mistakes are the ones I love ! because it teaches and trains you to avoid them, and how to think on the data structure the next time.
Eventually, you get to that place when you "see" the structure on the moment the client tells you the request, and then, you realized you had an ephiphany, that glorious moment when data is no longer a mistery to you!!!
Rgds,
Chandoo,
If the goal is to see the list of customers who have not business from yearX, I would change the helper column formula to :
=IF(selYear="all",sum(C4:M4),sum(offset(C4:M4,,selyear-2002,1,columns(C4:M4)-selyear+2002)))This formula will sum the sales from Selected Year to 2012.
JMarc
If you are already using a helper column and the combox box runs a macro after it changes, why not just adjust the macro and filter the source data?
Regards
I gotta say, it seems like you are giving 10 answers to 10 questions when your client REALLY wants to know is: "What is the last year "this" customer row had a non-zero Sales QTY?... You're missing the forest for the trees...
Change the helper column to:
=IFERROR(INDEX(tblSales[[#Headers],[Customer name]:[Sales 2012]],0,MATCH(9.99999999999999E+307,tblSales[[#This Row],[Customer name]:[Sales 2012]],1)),"NO SALES")
And yes, since I'm matching off of them for value, I would change the headers to straight "2002" instead of "Sales 2002" but you sort the table on the helper column and then and there you can answer all of your questions.
Hi thanks for this. Just can't figure out how you get the combo box to control the pivot table. Can you please advise?
Cheers
@Kevin.. You are welcome. To insert a combo box, go to Developer ribbon > Insert > form controls > combo box.
For more on various form controls and how to use them, please read this: http://chandoo.org/wp/2011/03/30/form-controls/
Thanks Chandoo. But I know how to insert a combobox, I was more referring to how does in control the year in the pivot table? Or is this obvious? I note that if I select the Selected Year from the PivotTable Field List it says "the field has no itens" whereas this would normally allow you to change the year??
Thanks again
worked it out thanks...
when =data!Q2 changes it changes the value in column N:N and then when you do a refreshall the pivottable vlaues get updated
Still not sure why PivotTable Field List says “the field has no itens"?? I created my own pivot table and could not repeat that.
Hi, I put the sales data in range(F5:P19) and added a column D with the title 'Last sales in year'. After that, in column D for each customer, the simple formula
=2000+MATCH(1000000,E5:P5)
will provide the last year in which that particular customer had any sales, which can than easily be managed by autofilter.
Somewhat longer but perhaps a bit more solid (with the column titles in row 4):
=RIGHT(INDEX($F$4:$P$19,1,MATCH(1000000,F5:P5)),4)
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