Tracking Daily Ticket Sales

So what your'e looking for is a running total, right? As in, total ticket sales as of day X, where X is any given day between the date of the first ticket sale and the date of the event.


Excel is probably the most accessable way to do this, and there are a couple of ways to create this calculation. Note: I've used the exact method described below to do exactly this in the past.


Before you start, it's probably easiest to create a second tab in the spreadsheet that currently has all of your gift information and the simple calculation you did to show number of tickets per transaction. 


Instructions for creating running total below:

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1. Create a column that simply has every date from the first ticket sale through the day of the event. Use the same date format as RE uses when you exported your gift data.
2. Create a second column to the right of this one that is called "tickets per day." 
3. In this column, you're going to use the SUMIF forumla to easily calculate the results from your quick calculations for number of tickets per transaction (which I assume you just divided the total amount by 40 to get, right?)
   1. The "IF" portion of this calculation is really a variable lookup, and in this case your variable is the date
   2. So, in cell B2, type =SUMIF([highlight the date column from your REexport],A2[this is the date from the date column you created in step 1],[highlight the columnt that contains your # of tickets per transaction]). 
      1. It'll look something like this when your'e done: =SUMIF(Sheet1!A:A,Sheet2!A2,Sheet1!B:B)
   3. Drag this forumula down through every cell in your 2nd column that needs a value, and it'll find the appropriate total for each date
   4. Now you have the total number of tickets sold per day, and we're almost done!
4. Make a 3rd column that says "running total"
   1. In cell C2, type this formula: =SUM(B2,B1)
   2. Drag this forumla so it populates a total in every cell in the column that needs data
5. Voila. You have a running total! Now you can either leave it as numerical values or highlight the table and create a quick chart to visualize your data.

NOTE: Once you've got everything set up for this year, you can do the same thing for past years as well. Once you've got your running totals per date for every year, I would highlight, copy, and paste special (values only), then reformat your data in the first column to just be a set of numbers that equal days prior to the event. So event day = 0, and every day out is one up from that. Then you can easily create a new table that has the total days prior to the event, and copy in the data for every year next to that in successive columns, and then create a chart from that data set so you can visualize how each year behaved. 


If you find any part of this confusing, please feel free to email me at RHyde@Lollypop.org and I'll send you some screenshots and whatnot to make it more clear.

 

Joanne Felci:

Thanks Ryan!!


I just sent you an email as I was following until your step 4 - the running total


joanne