Period Selection in Reporting

Edgar de Wit

When you build reports in Excel, you know the drill: endless tabs, long formulas, nested IFs, and VLOOKUPs that stretch across your screen like spaghetti. Difficult to read, and hard to maintain.

We built over 250 functions into our platform. But 2 of those are used very often, as they enable very powerful functionality that every report needs.

They’re called SELECTPERIOD and PERIODSUM. And they make financial reporting so much easier.

Let me explain with a typical real-world scenario.

The Standard Period Comparisons

Every finance team builds reports that compare periods. It’s the classic structure:

• This period vs. Budget (same period)
• Actuals year-to-date (YTD)
• Budget year-to-date
• And, of course, last year’s numbers (both period and YTD)

In Excel, this means writing and maintaining pretty complex formulas to get it right. You might end up with something like:

=SUMIFS(Data!C:C, Data!A:A, ">=" & StartDate, Data!A:A, "<=" & EndDate, Data!B:B, "Actuals")

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How XLReporting Makes It Simple

In XLReporting, you just need 2 functions to handle all this complexity.

Step 1: Use SELECTPERIOD

This function gives you a dropdown when running your report. You select a month or year, and the system knows exactly what you mean. It’s smart, dynamic, and user-friendly.

Step 2: Use PERIODSUM

This function calculates the totals you need based on your selected period. Here are the most-used combinations:

PERIODSUM(data, "PER")    => Current period
PERIODSUM(data, "YTD")    => Year-to-date, up to this period
PERIODSUM(data, "LY.PER") => Same period, last year
PERIODSUM(data, "LY.YTD") => Year-to-date, last year

That’s it. You define these in your report fields, and you can plug them into any layout you like.

Clean, Scalable, Repeatable

No more copying and pasting between Excel sheets. No more formula chaos. With SELECTPERIOD and PERIODSUM, your financial reports become structured, transparent, and scalable.

So next time you're spending hours building a reporting pack, ask yourself: What if 2 smart functions could do the heavy lifting?

XLReporting has these 2 functions.

Want to explore how this could work for your organization? Book a free 30-minute discovery call with one of our financial experts.