Enhancing your dashboard with insightful reports is an analytics challenge, one which Nextanalytics was designed for. In this example, we take a simple revenue and expense report and with just a few simple steps, produce a highlighted report showing customer profitability trends.

Start with a SQL query to get the revenue and expense data. This may be a query you already have for another report, and if some calculations are missing, we can fill them in with Nextanalytics.

With a few simple math operations, we have calculated the total sales, total costs and the resulting profits for each customer. There is no need to copy formulas or edit fragile SQL queries - Nextanalytics makes the simple operations simple to perform.

With the profit numbers, we flip the Quarters across the columns using a single command to produce a crosstab, or pivot table as it is called in Excel. Nextanalytics makes this easy, but to read more about the challenges of performing this not-so-simple operation with other tools - click here.

As an aside, we can create a quick summary page at this point to see a number of common metrics for each time period, all in one convenient table.

Back to our report -- to see meaningful trends, we need to normalize the big table of profitability numbers into a few fixed groupings or ranges. Again, Nextanalytics can perform this with a single command, creating buckets for net loss, under $5k, $5k - 10k, and so on. Each column now contains the number of customers in each profitability 'bucket' for each time period.

To make the trends readily visible, we use alert codes to color each cell red, yellow or green depending on whether the cells are below, near or above the average for that column. It is now easy to see the largest profit ranges for each quarter. When the data updates, all the calculations are dynamic and will update accordingly.

New business insight delivered in a few simple operations.