Can't get Smart number TY/LY comparisons to work as expected

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1

I’m new to metabase and i’m trying to setup some basic reporting for my team. I’m working with retail sales data and we constantly need to run reports like TY/LY comparisons or “next month, last year” . I’ve read a few tutorials about trends and smart numbers being a good way to do this, but so far have not had good results graphing, I always get stuck with a graph of a single period of time or a smart number telling me the difference.

I want to end up with a dashboard where users can select time periods for comparison. I’m comfortable writing the raw sql if needed, but I was hoping to get away from it by using metabase. Whats the best way for me to set this up?
Thanks in advance for any help !

2

Hi @s98754
Have a look at this blog post:
https://www.metabase.com/blog/Time-Series-Comparisons/index.html

3

Thanks, that looks like a good start.
Rather than hardcoding the date, is there a way to do something like “today-30” using the query builder or is that not possible?

edit: I just found this, is this a good solution?

4

@s98754 Currently no, the expression editor has only limited understanding of date functions:
https://github.com/metabase/metabase/issues/11330 - upvote by clicking :+1: on the first post

Yes, if you convert the questions to SQL, then you have much more control, but you said that you wanted to avoid that, so that’s why I didn’t gave that as a suggestion.