Understanding your Data Sources

The first thing to understand is what your data sources tell you and for that, I'd suggest reviewing our tutorial on understanding your data sources, if you're unsure.

Video Tutorial and our How-to Guide

Scatter Plot Chart

Once you're confident in your understanding of your underlying data then let's head over to Analytics on the Pricefx Menu, select Data Analyzer and let's being with a Scatter Plot Chart.

Open

There are a number of different charts that you could use here and I'll briefly show some of them as we progress. 

But here you have the Scatter Plot Chart and you can go ahead and create your own Revenue and Margin Comparison.

To begin with, we simply select your data source.

Open

In this example we are selecting our Standard Sales Data tables, but you'll need to select a data source that has at a minimum an Invoice Price, a Gross Margin, and a Pricing Date. This will allow you to get an overview of the revenue from the Invoice Price, compare it to the Gross Margin and do this over a time period, using the Pricing Date.

If you want to achieve more granular reporting by Customer or Product, you'll need to ensure that information is contained in the Data Source too.

Using your data you can now select the data that you want to display. In this example we have selected Invoice Price for Revenue and Gross Margin.

You can now aggregate by any of the fields that you have within your data, so here you could select to aggregate by Country if you want to determine which country was most profitable, you could do it by region, by Customer, or even by product.

If you were an account manager reviewing data on a specific customer you could simply click on the search button next to the Customer Filter and select the customer you're looking at.

Here you'll search for Renso Corp, and you can see the customer has multiple accounts, so let's select them all and confirm the selection by clicking on the Confirm Selection button on the bottom-right corner.

And now you want to see the results by Customer ID. So let's aggregate using the Customer ID option.

Apply and refresh and you're presented with all the data for each Customer ID we selected.

You may want to aggregate this by something other than address, so you scroll down in the settings and Aggregate by Product Line. Apply and Refresh and you have the data presented by Product Line for this customer.

You can see this one is Extrusion Grade, this one is Injection Moulding and up at the top we have intermediates.

You can change the aggregation or customer information as often as you'd like and really analyze the revenue and gross margin for this customer from all available angles. You can do the same in the Product Filter to analyze revenue and margin by Product.

Let's now return to the original configuration.

If you want to look at your data across customer groups, you could do that, you could group this by industry or even by groups of products.

Select Aggregation by Country to start with and then if you want to visually identify the region or area for each country, you can select Continent in Band By (which simply highlights different data with color) and click on Apply and Refresh.

And here you have the Revenue and Gross Margin by Country and with each Continent in a different color.

The data looks a little small here, so let's select the chart options and view it on full screen. It's a little bit clearer and a little bit easier to identify. This is a great view if you want to export to PNG, JPG, PDF or save it as a vector image for something else.

Now let's close that and look at some of the other options. Let's remove the Banding and Aggregate by Customer Name instead, and Apply and Refresh.

Now you can see the information displayed for different customers displaying the specific customer name alongside the Revenue and Margin achieved for that customer.

If you want some additional information on who the account manager is, you can simply Band By Account Manager, Apply and Refresh

Now you have the information color-coded to the Account Manager to easily visually compare Account Manager Performance.

And if you want to measure this over a time period you could add a generic filter where the pricing date here is equal to 2020 as a generic filter.

You're selecting pricing date here and equals and it gives you a drop-down to select.

You'll select 2020, we'll apply and apply and refresh and that has now changed the details. 

You can still see it's banded by the account manager so you still have the account manager's name there, the customer name, invoice price or revenue, and the gross margin that goes along with that.

Time Series Chart for Trend Analysis

You might now also want to see the trend of revenue and margin over time.

For that let's head back over to the Analytics menu, Data Analyzer and you'll go to a Time Series chart:

And if you use the same data source and parameters and you select the pricing date here and the gross margin, you can apply and refresh, and that gives you the time series year by year.

You can select to do that by month, by changing the Pricing Date Month, and you then have it month by month from the data source.

You can add a generic filter again and select the pricing date which must be equal to 2020 apply that:

Apply and Refresh, now you can see only month 1 through to month 12 for 2020, and that gives you a good insight into your gross margin for 2020.

You can now add a series and call this Revenue you'll leave that all as it is, but select it as a Line and you want this to be the Invoice Price.

Apply and refresh and then we have the gross margin and we have the invoice price or revenue as a line.

You could change that if you want to have them side by side you could have that as a simple bar chart with two series:

As with any previous chart you created, you can save it to come back later, you can open it in full screen to see the data better and export it as an image or an Excel file.

If you want more granularity for any specific month you could click on the data point, drill-down and select pricing date week. 

That takes that particular data point and it gives you a week-by-week rundown of the revenue and margin updated in the same chart. 

If you want to remove that and go back with simply hover your mouse to the drill-down dimensions, click on the Delete icon and it refreshes itself there so you can see the original chart.

Pie Charts for Comparison

Now let's head over to Pie charts back to Analytics, Data Analyzer, and select the Pie Chart.

Pie charts are traditionally used for comparing a single data point relative to another so you might have revenue by country as displayed which is useful but not if you want to do a comparison. 

With Pricefx however you can add an additional series to the Pie Chart Settings and it creates a second pie chart using the same underlying data and colors so you can easily present the two side by side.

Let’s open one that already existed by clicking on the Load Chart, Revenue and Margin Comparison, click on the Load button to apply that:

Here you can see using the same data source and two series you have series one and series two revenue by country and gross margin by country so now you can easily present it side by side information.

So whether you're seeking to analyze specific details of your Revenue and Margin to improve performance or create a powerful graphic for presenting to key decision-makers the tools are available within Pricefx Analytics.