Waterfall widgets are used to explain why a metric changed over time by highlighting the drivers visually as increases or decreases. 

Common use cases for waterfall charts include:

• How profits changed over time
• How headcount changed
• To what extend each account contributed to a change in income or expenses

Analysts can use the widget to identify the aspects of the business that are contributing to the fluctuations in the values. The widget can also be used to perform What-if analyses.

You can choose between two different kinds of waterfall widgets; breakdown and walkthrough charts.

Breakdown Charts

 Breakdown charts show what's driving the change between two periods or hierarchy levels by showing the contributing factors as increases or decreases.

For example, the following breakdown chart shows the drivers of why income increased year-over-year.

Here are step-by-step instructions how you would create this breakdown chart from the Dashboard page:

Waterfall Options

Click on Waterfall Options to change the color of increases and decreases as well as the categories. That’s useful if you want to show expenses instead of income, because expense increases are commonly shown in red and decreases in green.

Aggregations

You can use the Aggregation feature to switch from month-over-month to full-year comparisons and choose other aggregations, such as Month or Quarter.

Access it with the Aggregation button, as shown here:

Walkthrough Charts

Walkthrough charts visualize the degree of which different drivers have a positive or negative impact on results.

For example, in the screenshot below we show the reconciliation of Net Income by visualizing the impact of each P&L component:

 The steps to create walkthrough charts are identical to the breakdown widget, with the exception that walkthrough charts only use "Category", "Value", and "Filter" fields. 

If you have any questions that weren’t addressed by this article, please reach out to the Support Team via support@datarails.com. We are happy to help.

Updated March 31, 2024 11:01