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How to create and use Metric Formulas - for Investors
How to create and use Metric Formulas - for Investors

Using metric formulas to extract insights

Matt Preuss avatar
Written by Matt Preuss
Updated over 2 months ago

Formulas are a great way to extract insights from the portfolio metric data you've got in your Visible account.

To create a formula, navigate to Metrics, followed by Portfolio metrics. From here, navigate to the top right of your account and select +New formula.


Within the Formula section, you can create a title and description for your custom formula metric along with the category, default aggregation, frequency, and default unit & format.

You can use portfolio metrics, portfolio metric formulas, and metric insights as inputs in the formula. Below, we walk through an example of creating a Revenue per Employee Ratio formula.


To create this formula, pull in the Revenue metric and select the insight Trailing 4 periods. This sums the past 4 quarters of revenue data so that the formula is using total revenue from the past year.

Note: If you're using monthly Revenue, you'll want to use the insight Trailing 12 periods to use total revenue from the past year.

Next, divide Revenue (trailing 4 periods) by the Headcount at the end of the period (denoted by "Last Value").

Then, press save at the bottom of the screen.

You can now pull this metric into a Portfolio Report, Flexible Dashboard, or One Pager to further analyze the data.

Formula Examples:

  • Revenue per Employee = Annual Revenue / Headcount

    • This answers the question: 'How efficient is this company performing'?

  • Runway = Cash on Hand / Monthly Burn

    • This answers the question: 'How many months until this company runs out of cash'?

  • Gross Profit = Revenue - COGS

    • This answers the question: 'Is the company making enough money to cover its costs'?

  • Customer Aquisition Cost = (Cost of Sales + Marketing) / New Customers Acquired

    • This answers the question: 'Is the company's investment in S&M making a return'?

Please let us know if you have any additional questions!

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