Compare This Year to Last Year with a Dynamics CRM chart

Comparing sales performance this period vs. the same period last year is a fairly standard metric. However, to create a chart that compares the period this year, with last years in the same date range can be tricky. For example, today is June 21st. I want to see my actual sales for this year to date, compared to my actual sales last year, until June 21st. Or Year to Date vs. Last Year to Date (YTD vs. LYTD).

Or maybe I want to compare my sales this year and last year by month.

In this post I will detail how I created both of these charts.

Compare YTD to LYTD in MS Dynamics CRM

Before I start to create the chart, I need to get some components ready first.

These are:

• View of Won Opportunities – This and Last Year
• Fetchxml filter for YTD
• Fetchxml filter for LYTD

Create the View for the chart

Open Advanced Find on opportunities and create the following view:

Name it “Won Opportunities: This And Last Year.” Always use this view with the charts in this post.

After saving it, keep Advanced Find open and use it to create the fetchxml filters we need to modify the chart xml with.

Create the following filters and download the fetchxml. You can download the fetchxml without saving the View first.

Filter for YTD

 Filter for LYTD

Using the Older Than X Years will make sure we only get the LYTD date range for the won opportunities.

Note: Are you on a version earlier than CRM2015, you can use “Older Than X Months”, with X being 12, and get the same result.

Chart Editor

Time to open up the chart editor.

Save a chart similar to the settings here.

The two series for actual revenue, is what will be modified to YTD and LYTD using the filters we just downloaded from Advanced Find.

Now the chart xml is ready to export and we can have some fun!

Fetchxml edits

The two attributes for the actual value series will need to be edited so they use the filters we just downloaded.

Here is the fetchcollection with the additions made and the filters downloaded from Advanced Find highlighted in yellow.

Fetchcollection edits:

• Created link-entity outer joins so the series only includes the filtered data.
• Added the YTD and LYTD filters downloaded from Advanced Find.
• Renamed the aliases from _CRMAutoGen_aggregate_column_Num_0 or similar to more sensible names.
  • If renaming the aliases, remember to update them in the categorycollection too.

Other changes:

• Make sure the series are in the same order in both the categorycollection and in the series section
• Custom LegendText
• Custom LabelFormat
• Format the Y axis numbers

The categorycollection is where you can adjust if YTD or LYTD should come first. In this example YTD comes first.

The new formatting is designed to show amounts in the thousands with negative and zero values suppressed. See this post for details on chart labels and formatting.

Import the XML and this should be your result.

Here is the chart and we can see how our performance is compared to the same period last year.

If you would like to see the data grouped by something else, such as customer or owner, you can open the editor and change the category.

Just keep in mind that if you make any changes to the legend entries you will lose your xml customizations.

Compare to Last Year by Month

For better insights on our sales development, we can group the sales by month instead.

Start with the chart we just made and use the editor to change the groupby to Actual Close Date and Month.

Click Save As and save the chart under a different name.

The result should look like this.

Now we see the same data spread out per month instead. What I would like to do is include all of last years data and then have the month columns next to each other, so March of this year is next March of last year, etc.

In short, what I will do is remove the Older-Than-1-Year filter so we get all of last year. Next I will split the data onto two separate X axes. One for each year and set the chart to display them in sync with each other so the months line up.

Note: We are working with data by month. If data points are missing for a certain month, that month will not be included. For this chart, we are relying on having 12 data points for each year. If you do not have a data point for each  of the past months, then use dummy records to ensure a data point exists for the missing months. These can be of zero value and will not interfere with the calculations. You do not need records for future months.

Update filter and add secondary X axis

Export the chart xml.

First remove the “older than” clause in the fetchcollection.

Now scroll down and add the secondary X axis. Both in the Series and Axis section.

I added XAxisType=”Secondary” to the series for this year to indicate which series should go on the secondary X axis.

The AxisX2 section is identical to AxisX except for the “2” so you can copy it and add the number.

Import the chart xml back into MS Dynamics CRM.

Notice that the secondary X axis has been added to the top of the chart. The blue columns are actually bound to the top (secondary axis) and the orange are on the bottom axis.

Overlap axes

Next step is to make the two axes overlap so it is easy to compare a month this year, to the same month last year.

We have 24 data points. One for each month of the two years. The series for last year is displayed on Axis 1 and should show points 0 – 12 (Jan-Dec of 2014). Axis 2 has the data for this year and should show points 12-24 (Jan-Dec of 2015).

To achieve that, I add Minimum and Maximum values to each axis so they are aligned.

Here are the chart xml axis edits.

IntervalOffset=”1″ is added so the axis does not show the zero value (i.e. Dec 2014 on the 2015 axis).
Interval=”1″ is added to make the intervals consistent between the two axes and show every month.

Notice the maximums are set to 12.5 and 24.5. That is to make sure the data for the last month is displayed in full. If set to 12 and 24 only half the column would display.

Import the xml and this should be the final result.

The chart type on Last Year can be changed to Line, ChartType=”Line”, to get this result.

As always, hope you enjoyed the post and found something useful. Please follow me on Twitter Follow @crmchartguy or sign up for the newsletter to be alerted on new posts.