One of the advantages of Microsoft® Excel® that it allows you to present and easily total your data across multiple time frames. There’s now also an easy way to combine reporting periods in Sage Intelligence Reporting formulas. When reporting on different periods using the Sage Intelligence Report Designer, this is usually done by placing your financial formulas in separate columns for each reporting period and then using an Excel sum to add up the values.
Let’s take a look at the example of calculating your Actuals for the first quarter, separate columns for periods 1, 2 and 3 are used. A fourth column is included, which totals the values from the first three.
There may be times when you’re only interested in your quarter totals and have no need to show the details for each period in your layout. Sage Intelligence provides a convenient way to do this using period ranges. Entering your periods as a range, the same result can be achieved, in less space and time.
To continue with our example, follow these steps:
- Enter the value ‘1 TO 3’ as the period value in your Actuals formula;
- The total for periods 1, 2 and 3 will be returned.
- When doing this, be sure to leave a space on either side of the ‘TO’.
Sage Intelligence goes one step further by allowing you to combine non-adjacent periods. Separating the values with a comma, the periods you include will be added together. For example, if you’d like to add your Actuals for periods 1 and 3 then enter ‘1, 3’ as the period value in your Actuals formula. This may be useful when you are trying to fix your financial data.