Any new ways to deal with costs and revenue tables?

Question

I have a table of costs, and a table of revenue. At this point I have a summary table of months, with a 'key' in both revenue and costs tables, to look at everything on a monthly basis.

With the introduction of dashboards, summary formulas in reports, formula queries, etc, is there a better way to do this now? I still think i need a summary table to accomplish this, but am wondering if this is still true?

Ultimately, I am trying to look at gross margin and other items which involve formulas between costs and revenue.

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Mike Tamoush
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markshnier__you · Answer

Are these tables related?&nbsp; Or what do they have in common?------------------------------Mark Shnier (YQC)mark.shnier@gmail.com------------------------------

miketamoush · Answer

Projects. I can relate them all to a project summary table and pull costs and revenue per project there. I thought about using that table, but what I can't figure out is - I will have multiple dates. The date the revenue is recorded and the date the cost is recorded. This may be in different months. So if I use the project summary table, I don't think I can look at Gross margin per month?

It feels to me like I will still need to utilize a monthly summary table to look at costs/revenue per month, and a project summary table to view per project.

In the same way, I feel like I would also need a yearly summary table to view per year.

But I also keep thinking that all these new tools were supposed to help me avoid these summary tables...

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Mike Tamoush
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markshnier__you · Answer

But the fundamental problem is that if you have a mismatch on timing between revenue and cost recognition then you can't really know what the margin is in a particular month because for example a month maybe all cost and no revenue. And opposite for the next month. So really arguably the margin really only makes sense on a project to date basis. Even if you go annually then you can still have the problem that there is a stub of a cost or a revenue recognition mismatch during that. Of course the same problem can happen even on a project today basis if you have not got around to billing Revenue yet.

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Mark Shnier (YQC)
mark.shnier@gmail.com
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miketamoush · Answer

Try telling that to my mgmt! :) LOLI don't disagree, but alas I have been tasked with looking at costs and revenue per month, even though as you said, if a project costs hit one month and the revenue the next, its a bit non nonsensical. But if we have 30 projects in a month they can at least see how the costs and revenue are hitting as a total for all projects.Do you see any other way besides the monthly summary table? I think I still need it, but at least the new dashboards have global filters so I can avoid the user focus trick for that.Let me know if you think of a new trick with summary formulas or something sneaky!------------------------------Mike Tamoush------------------------------

miketamoush · Answer

Insult to injury - if I roll up to a monthly summary table, I don't think I can then use the new dashboard global filters....except for the month. Any other filter is inherent to cost/revenue, which just got rolled up.....At least with the user focus table I can use the filters in the summary fields to look at the current user selections.....hmmm.I'm thinking my use case has not changed at all with the new features.------------------------------Mike Tamoush------------------------------

Forum Discussion

Any new ways to deal with costs and revenue tables?