Purple Frog Systems

In my previous post I explained how to create a calculated MDX member that projects full year data (sales etc.) based on existing year to date data.

In this post I’ll be doing exactly the same but in DAX, the new expression language used to enhance PowerPivot data. As it’s the same desired outcome, I’m not going to repeat the background, you’ll have to look at my previous post for that.

The expressions below assume that you have a single table ‘Sales’ with a [Date] column and an [Internet Sales Amount] column.

Step 1 – What are our total sales so far this year?

We use the TOTALYTD function to work this out for us

  =TOTALYTD(SUM(Sales[Internet Sales Amount])
     ,Sales[Date], all(Sales))

The first parameter is the expression we want to calculate, i.e. the sum of internet sales.
The second parameter specifies the date we’re calculating up to.
The third parameter is one that catches a lot of people out. We have to tell DAX the context of the date. As it stands the expression can only see the data in the selected row, by specifing all(Sales) in the filter we expand the expression to be able to look at all of the data.

Step 2 – How far are we though the year?

It’s here where DAX really shows an improvement in the functions available over and above what’s available in MDX. There’s a YEARFRAC function which calculates how far we are through the year.

  =YEARFRAC(
     CONCATENATE("01/01/"
         ,year(Sales[Date]))
     ,Sales[Date]))

The first parameter is the start date, i.e. the 1st January. We have to build this using the year of the selected row to ensure we get the right year.
The second parameter is the date of the record we’re looking at, Sales[Date].

Step 3 – Project the value to the end of the year

We combine the two values by simply dividing the YTD figure by how far we are through the year

  =TOTALYTD(SUM(Sales[Internet Sales Amount])
     ,Sales[Date], all(Sales))
  / YEARFRAC(
      CONCATENATE("01/01/"
          , year(Sales[Date]))
     ,Sales[Date]))

This chart shows how the full year run rate is adjusted throughout the year as the cumulative sales to date grows. At the start of the year it’s quite volatile, but from February it settles down with an acurate projection.

And it really is as easy as that.

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