Using metric formulas to extract insights
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:
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Revenue per Employee = Annual Revenue / Headcount
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This answers the question: 'How efficient is this company performing'?
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Runway = Cash on Hand / Monthly Burn
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This answers the question: 'How many months until this company runs out of cash'?
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Gross Profit = Revenue - COGS
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This answers the question: 'Is the company making enough money to cover its costs'?
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Customer Aquisition Cost = (Cost of Sales + Marketing) / New Customers Acquired
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This answers the question: 'Is the company's investment in S&M making a return'?
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