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Bernard K

Month-over-Month (MoM) Analysis in Tableau

Updated: Nov 8, 2022


Introduction

Month-over-month (MoM) analysis shows how a given variable increases or decreases from one month to the next. For example, a 2% MoM Revenue growth would imply that the current month’s revenue increased by 2% when compared to the previous month revenue.

Visually, such data would be presented as shown below.

month over month analysis in tableau

(Which shows the daily revenue, over the two months –> i.e., current month revenue against the previous month revenue)

The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t quantify the change over the period you’re comparing - and therefore in this article I will be sharing different ways to compute MoM analysis in Tableau.

A quick way – using table calculation ‘percent difference’

One of the quickest and easiest way to compute month-over-month analysis is using the table calculation percent difference.

To do that - first create a table showing the values (in this case revenue) by month.

Add a quick table calculation percent difference.

computing percent difference in tableau

Resulting to…

(Which compares the revenue generated from one month to the next – and that’s why you can see January returns nothing since there is no previous month to compare with. From this analysis, you can see February recorded a 252.6% growth in revenue when compared to January).

2ND way to compute MoM analysis

The other way to compute month-over-month analysis is by using the following calculation – which is essentially the same computation above - but in this case in formula form.

(This calculation computes the monthly revenue – then subtracts the revenue value of the previous month before dividing the results with the previous month revenue –> hence computing the percent change in revenue from one month to the next)

3rd way to compute MoM analysis

The other way you can compute month-over-month analysis is by using month-to-date (MTD) values and previous month-to-date (PMTD) values as shown below.

MoM Analysis = ((MTD Value – PMTD Value)/PMTD Value) *100

Note: The challenge with this approach is that it locks the computation on a single section of the timeline (i.e., current month against the previous month based on the current date), unless you use a parameter to enable dynamic selection of the month you would like to evaluate.

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About Me

More About the Author

Bernard K

Analytics Consultant | 3X Tableau Certified

Bernard is a data analytics consultant helping businesses reveal the true power of their data and bring clarity to their reporting dashboards. He loves building things and sharing knowledge on how to build dashboards that drive better outcomes.

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