Many users of Spotfire use it to analyze sales data and trends over time. However, many companies do not use the calendar year for their fiscal year. Up until now, we had to use a couple calculated columns to adjust for a custom fiscal period.
Starting in version 5.5, there is built-in support for custom Fiscal Years. There are a couple options to implement this.
First, there is a new built-in Document Property called ‘FiscalYearOffset’, which can also be set as Preference on the Server. This allows you to set the number of months from the start of the calendar year to the start of the fiscal year. For example, -1 will mean the Fiscal Year starts in December.
Then, there are some new expression functions available for Fiscal Calculations.
Assume we have a standard cumulative sum expression, for example, on the value-axis. We can update the category-axis, to us the FiscalBinByDateTime function. This function acts very similar to the pre-existing BinByDateTime function, except it takes in an optional fourth argument, which is the offset in months. If no offset is used, it defaults to the setting of the FiscalYearOffset Document Property.
<FiscalBinByDateTime([Order Date],"Year.Quarter.Month",1)>
Additional functions are available for FiscalMonth, FiscalQuarter, and FiscalYear calculations using the FiscalYearOffset Document Property.
