Monthly revenue per employee overview with Year-over-Year comparison
Objective of the experiment
Power BI offers extensions like Zebra BI, which simplify the creation of dashboards and reports following IBCS (International Business Communication Standards). I wanted to explore how difficult it would be to recreate some of these visualizations using Dash/Plotly. I did not research whether libraries exist within this tech stack that could simplify the process.
Another key objective was to create a visualization with a predefined structure rather than one I could design freely. This approach forces you to encounter the limitations and edge cases of the tools being used.
Technical Challenge
One such edge case involved highlighting differences between this year’s and last year’s revenue (e.g., using red for negative changes and green for positive ones). To achieve this, I had to calculate the intersection points between the revenue trend lines and incorporate them into the area definitions that needed specific coloring.
A month ago, ChatGPT didn’t have a solution for this—but Stack Overflow still did. 😊
Demo Topic: The demo focuses on monthly revenue per employee, comparing it to the same period in the previous year ($ py).
Demo includes:
- Fixed Y-Axis Range: Ensures consistency across all amounts, allowing for both a clear year-over-year comparison for an individual and an instant visual comparison between different individuals.
- Conditional Area Fill: Implements a method to determine whether the area should be colored red or blue, even when the initial data points do not align with the intersection points of the trend lines.
IBCS stands for International Business Communication Standards and provides practical guidelines for consistently designing reports, visuals, and dashboards to enhance clarity and understanding.