To Freeform or NOT

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Nick Ogle A+ 6
NO
To Freeform or NOT

Hi

I have built a modular spreadsheet showing the

(1) Base case - As Is Cost (ie do nothing) Income Statement

(2) Target Operating Model Income Statement

The difference between the 2 cases represents the savings from adopting a new strategy. Lets say the savings are mostly from Cost of Goods sold and Salaries.

I now wish to compare As Is COGS versus TOM CoGS to work out COGS savings; and As Is Salaries versus TOM Salaries to work out salary savings.

I could insert a Freeform worksheet and then cell reference the relavant AS IS and TOM Income statement total lines for COGS and Salaries and then work out the savings.

Is this the best approach?

Michael Hutchens A+ 189

Hi Nick,

Technically,you can use freeform sheets whenever you want, but ideally you should only really use them when you need to do things that you can’t do within modules, as content within freeform sheets is not reusable and scalable like module component content.

There are many ways you could go about building a custom module to compare the data in your two income statements in your model, but in essence you simply need to:

  1. Insert a new empty module.
  2. Add a component with the same time series properties as that used for the components within your income statement modules.
  3. Link in the data from your two income statement modules.
  4. Add calculations comparing them.

You could link in all categories from each income statement or totals only, depending on the level of detail you want in your comparison.

Another approach could be to add another component to one of the existing income statement modules and link in the outputs of the other income statement into this component for the comparison. This approach is a bit dirty from a modular perspective, but if you’re not planning on reusing the modules in future financial models it will do.

we actually do something quite similar to this in the Budget Dashboard module on the Modano website, which calculates the variance between the forecast and budget income statements:

https://www.modano.com/content/libraries/modano/modules/budget_dashboard-comprehensive-m~hf-uk

I'd recommend checking this out as an example. M.

Nick Ogle A+ 6
NO

Thank you very much Mike, I ended up using and modifying a Financial Statement Summary dashboard. Thanks again