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When Average is better - An Introduction to the Status Statistic

Many businesses track statistics such as sales, income and leads. These are cumulative statistics where weekly values add up to monthly values. For example, 10 sales a week totals 40 per month (and with our new split values feature, you can be certain that envisage is reporting an accurately adjusted monthly value).

But what about a statistic like Bank Balance? This is not the type of statistic you want to “add up” when changing the frequency from days or weeks to months. For example, let’s say the weekly Bank Balance for the last 4 weeks was:

  • Week 1: $5,000

  • Week 2: $2,000

  • Week 3: $8,000

  • Week 4: $10,000

To view this graph on a monthly graph means all values are added together showing a “total” bank balance of $25,000. This is incorrect, as the actual balance is the balance reported on week 4 — $10,000.

We call this kind of statistic a “status statistic.” It is a report of the current status of something. It’s not cumulative.

Some more examples of Status Statistics are:

  • Total Number of Staff

  • Total Unpaid Bills

  • Total Number of Customers

Is there a way to view a status graph when changing the time frequency? The answer is “yes".

Using Bank Balance as an example, let’s say it is reported weekly, but you’d like to know what the average balance is over a month, a quarter or an entire year.

With envisage you have the following options:

  1. Add values together for longer time frames (the default)

  2. Average values for longer time frames

The settings for this can be found in the Graph Edit as shown below.

Here’s an example.

The Bank Balance graph below is a WEEKLY graph displayed as an average over a MONTH and a QUARTER.

Note: the Quarterly graph has a value of $63,258 without a plotted line. This indicates an incomplete period (the quarter is not complete). Read more about incomplete periods here.

Therefore, no matter what type of statistic you are tracking, with envisage you can easily view it in different frequencies and gain further insight into what is happening across all aspects of your business.

We know what you’re thinking. Envisage is definitely better than your average analytics app, no matter what time frame you’re using. 🙂