How to use YTD and QTD to Compare Scenarios Across Time

Throughout the year, you'll likely want to compare Actuals data to other Scenarios such as Budget or Forecast. While Budget and Forecast data for any given month is typically imported into Cube before the year begins, Actuals data can't be imported until the given month's books have been closed.

But why is that a problem? To illustrate, let's create a table with each month of 2019 in the Columns and a few scenarios in the Rows:

This table is helpful if I want to evaluate the variance between actuals and budget for individual months, but what if I wanted to look at the variance for the year so far? The 2019 summary column doesn't help much here, as it sums everything from January to December.

YTD Column

Within the same table I created above, I'm going to manually insert a column to the left of 2019, input YTD as the header, then click Fetch Data on the sidebar. I now see the following:

Rather than summing every month of 2019, the YTD column only sums months in which data exists for all scenarios (January -> May in this case).

Notes

• QTD can be used instead of YTD if you're looking to compare scenarios within the current quarter. 
• YTD and QTD columns can only be inserted into tables with Time in the columns and Scenarios in the rows