Cumulative Sales by Year and Month Comparison
Summary
This explains how to create a Salesforce Opportunities Report that displays cumulative sales by month comparing the current year and previous year side-by-side in a line chart. The solution involves using two groupings: Close Date by Year and Close Date by Month, and enabling the cumulative option on the chart’s Y-axis to roll up sales amounts month-over-month. Salesforce admins can replicate this to track sales performance trends over fiscal years with visual clarity, especially useful for comparing progress toward goals or commitments. It’s a practical pattern for making historical sales comparisons visually intuitive.
Takeaways
- Use Opportunities Report filtered for Current and Previous Fiscal Years.
- Group data first by Close Date (Year), then by Close Month.
- Configure line chart X-Axis with Close Month and Close Date (Year).
- Enable the Cumulative option to show running total of sales amounts.
- Sum Amount should be set on Y-Axis to aggregate sales values correctly.
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 9 (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. Lets 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.