The monthly report

Every month someone asks the same four questions: how much did we sell, how many orders was that, what did an average order bring in, and how much came back? The answer usually lives in a spreadsheet that gets copied forward each month, so it has to be built once, built right, and be easy for the next person to check.

This chapter is the capstone, and it follows the order an analyst works in. First you turn a vague request into an objective you can actually answer, using the SMART checklist, and sketch the report it will become: objective, data and method, findings, recommendations, limits. Then you build the numbers for Harbor & Pine’s November 2025: order totals from order lines with SUMIF, revenue by channel with SUMIFS, return rates with COUNTIFS, a KPI block, and the one sentence a manager actually reads, written with TEXT and &. The boss level assembles the whole chain on one sheet.

You could build the channel summary with a PivotTable too. Here it is built with formulas on purpose: the sheet recalculates the moment the data changes, and every number in the report can be clicked and traced back to the rows it came from.

The definition is the one from the SQL and pandas holiday case: net line revenue is quantity × price × (1 − discount ÷ 100), on completed orders only, without shipping. Where a level works on the whole month, its numbers match that case to the cent. Where a full export would not fit the sheet, the level works on one day of November and says so.