MoneyWorks Manual
Percentage Breakdowns
It is often useful to look at percentage breakdowns on a report. For example, what percentage of total sales are purchases, or what percentage of income is derived from consulting.
Such details are not difficult to prepare in MoneyWorks. However before we can calculate an item as a percentage of another item (such as sales), we need to determine what the total for the other item is. Thus we will create an invisible section of the report that calculates the total sales, and we will use this to work out percentage of sales figures.
- Insert 3 new parts above the Activate and Clear Accumulator part
- Make the topmost of these new parts an Accumulator with a name of “PCT”, and the operation On, Clear
We will total the income into this new accumulator
- Set the next part to Accounts of Type Sales, and set the Invisible check box
The invisible option means that no information is printed for the part, allowing us to use parts in calculations and not have them appear on the page. In this case, because the PCT accumulator is activated, the total income will be placed into this accumulator.
We need to turn the accumulator off so it won’t keep accumulating as we print out the actual income.
- Make the remaining new part an Accumulator with a name of “PCT”, and the operation Off
We have now set up an accumulator that pre-calculates the total sales—it does this for each column in the report. We will now insert a column in our report that displays each income item as a percentage of the total income.
- Highlight the COL4 column (last month), and click the Insert button
A new part will be inserted to the left of COL4
- Open the part, set the heading to “% Sales” and the column type to Calculation with the following settings
Recall that COL3 contained the totals for the month. PCT.COL3 refers to COL3 in the accumulator called PCT. You will recall that PCT contains the total income (and further that this, being a credit, was a negative number—hence the negative sign at the start of the formula).
Note: You’ll get an error message when you accept this calculation. This is because the accumulator PCT may not have been created when you come to do the column calculation. In this case it will be, so just ignore the warning.
- Set the “%” check-box, and click OK
This will append a % symbol to each value in the column.
- Preview the report, closing when finished
You’ll note in preview that the percentage of sales is also applied to the cost of sales. You can suppress this if you want by using a blank cell.
- Double click on the cell at the intersection of the Accounts of Type CS part and the COL6 column.
The Cell Settings dialog box will open. We can if want put text or a formula into this, but we will just leave it blank.
- Click OK, and preview the report
The Cell Settings box will close, and the cell will have a diagonal line in the top right corner, indicating a cell setting. This overrides the column setting, effectively blanking it out.
If you need to remove a cell, highlight it and click the Delete button.