Tableau graph average and sum

Question

I have transactional data for a sales team showing the transaction amount per transaction, the sales person for that transaction, his team and his salary. Every row denotes a unique transaction (please refer image). I need to make a team-level graph which shows the correlation between the salary they are paid and the revenue they generate for the company i.e. a simple stacked bar chart with salesTeam name on X axis and amounts on the y axis with every bar representing the total salary and total revenue(Amount) for a team.

In the example I've highlighted team 'Central', for which the salary paid is 25k (10k for salesperson A + 15k for salesperson B) and the revenue they make for the company is 430k. Please note that the salaries for some salespersons may be missing (eg. for E). The issue I'm facing is that sum(Salary) adds up the salaries for every row, so for salesperson A it becomes 20k instead of 10k. I tried avg(Salary) but that doesn't work as Tableau calculates the average for the entire column instead of average per salesperson. How can I solve this issue?

Thanks

I have implemented your requirement. Average is working fine for me. Can you explain more or post a image where you are getting wrong? — Siva

smb smb · Accepted Answer · 2017-12-19T02:29:22

Here you have a level of detail problem. Basically, Tableau will calculate a formula at the level of detail of the visualisation, so if salesperson is not in your view it will roll up the equation to calculate at the highest level. This is great when you want a dynamic calculation but that doesn't sound like what you are trying to achieve.

Your best option would be to aggregate the data into Tableau so you only have 1 line per sales person with a total of their revenue for all transactions. This would avoid the complexity of the calculated field (and make Tableau perform better).

However, if this is not possible the good news is the answer is a Level of Detail expression (i recommend doing some reading on this if you havent come across before). Basically, you tell Tableau at what level you want the calculation at.

If I understand you want to calculate the ratio of transaction amount and salary paid for each team.

So create a calculated field as follows:

    { FIXED [Team]
: sum(([Amount]))/
(sum({ FIXED [Sales person]: 
AVG([Salary])}))
}

What this does is calculates for each team the ratio between the amount and the salary. The use of the second fixed equation that is nested within it (Salesperson) ensures that the salary is not summed for the number of transactions of a salesperson.

Using this I got a result of 17.2 for Central. Is this what you would expect? Do you need a way to account for salaries that are not known?

Tableau graph average and sum

1 Answers