Cumulative Sales by Year and Month Comparison

Recently I was taking a look at the Report and Dashboard topic in the Trailblazer community and came across a post by someone struggling to produce a Report. They were trying to show a cumulative line chart to broke down sales by month comparing this year to last year. The goal was to be able to show how much was sold cumulatively through July or last year compared to July of this year. This should be done via line graph. The timing of this post was impeccable as I had just created the exact same Report. As a Co-Organizer of Northeast Dreamin‘ (shameless plug), which a community event in New Hampshire October 15-16, 2024, I was presenting some metrics to our team to see where we were for sponsor commitments compared to this time last year. The Report that I used to show this was exactly the same as needed by the post I came across. Let’s take a look at how we do this.

The first step is to use an Opportunities Report and add a Close Date filter for Current and Previous FY.

Next we will add two Groupings, one using Close Month, and the other using Close Date (2). This is an out of the box second Close Date Grouping option, nothing custom. Close Date (2) should be the first Grouping, this will display the Year by selecting Group Date by Calendar Year. Close Month will be the second Grouping, this will display the Month by selecting, Group Date by Calendar Month in Year.

Next we will need to configure our line chart. We’ll set Close Month as the top selection for the X-Axis and Close Date (2) as the second. We’ll also need to make sure we check the Cumulative checkbox. The Y-Axis will be Sum of Amount and the lines will now add all previous month’s Amount into the next month.

When we’re finished we should have something that looks like this: