5 Common—and Fundamental—Business Calculations Used in Everyday Analysis

Plus: How to build them in Pyramid Analytics, without all the fuss

In any thoughtful analytical exercise, impromptu questions continually arise. Yet analysts and business professionals often struggle to perform very basic ad hoc calculations within common business intelligence tools. As a workaround, users will often pull data into Excel to build basic formulations such as time-period aggregates, percent-of-parent calculations, and dynamic cumulative totals.

There are downsides to this approach: users are duplicating data and further fragmenting the analytic process. Analysis is a continually evolving exercise. Users need to think about the next question constantly. And the next question after that. Answering each successive one cannot come at a tremendous cost or effort. That’s why it’s crucial that users be able to write common business calculations easily within their analytics tool.

Join Ian Macdonald (Principal Technologist, Pyramid Analytics) to learn how Pyramid Analytics’ powerful and flexible calculation engine can be used throughout the application to answer the types of ad hoc questions that constantly arise during everyday analyses.

In this 50-minute webinar, you’ll:

• See an overview of Pyramid’s calculation engine, which can be used across the platform (Model, Formulate, Discover, and mobile)
• Watch how users—both advanced and novice—can use a graphical editor to build common business calculations (such as YTD/MTD/WTD aggregates, percent-of-parent calculations, dynamic cumulative totals, period-on-period calculations, and rolling averages) that answer fundamental business questions
• Learn the pros and cons of performing calculations at the granular (Model), semantic (Formulate), and context calculation (Discover) level—and understand the ideal scenarios for each approach
• Learn about Pyramid Query Language (PQL), the underlying programming language that Pyramid automatically generates when users build calculations with the graphical editor