Hello finance community! Wondering if there are already some standard templates and examples that are traditionally used in the Finance world. For example, a budget vs. actuals; CY actuals vs PY actuals or actuals vs. forecast. Tableau does not seem as friendly to make these comparisons at both a detailed and summary level. Likewise, presentation in a tabular format does not seem as easy as I thought it should. Finally - interested in seeing how others have prepared their data sets prior to visualization. Using questions above, one data source for budget and one data source for actuals or are these datasets combined (union) for Tableau.
Hi Steve - as a follow on to data structure as it does point to the same question I have in many ways. Much I have read says Tableau prefers data up and down vs right to left. So rather than having a column for each time period (e.g. month), I instead have a row that has a column for date, a column for type and an amount. However, for calculations on the data, I find this to be more difficult as to calculate some values, other types and time periods need to be factored. Consider these data elements:
I need to create a calculation creates the net of "new sales" + "price increase" - "churn" which I would call NetValue. But how do I distinguish the Amount field to just sum those particular types? From there, I need to create another calculation that is dependent upon month - if month = Jan, then NetValue/11 elseif month = Feb then NetValue/10 elseif month = Mar then NetValue/9 etc. Again, I feel like having these values all contained in one dataset is not conducive for creating calculations. Would I be better off bringing the entire dataset into Tableau, but then filtering so I effectively create 4 different sources that are joined in Tableau?
