In Excel it would be easy: Prior Result + new Result = Running Total thus far
But I can’t figure it out in Coda.
I need this so that I can calculate the payback period on a customer.
E.g. A customer costs $3,000 to acquire and they are paying a variable amount per month (based on usage of their product). I want to show that, for example, at Month 3 we’ve made our money back. Anyone have an idea how to do this?
EDIT
A workaround that I’m currently using is showing the average payback period. I do this by dividing Cost of Acquisition by the average of the Profit column. But this has obvious deficiencies.
For example if someone’s usage skyrockets late in the year, it skews the average to make it seem like we were profitable much sooner than we were.
For example:
cost of acquisition = $10,000
month profit 1 $100 2 $100 3 $100 4 $100 5 $10,000
Average payback period = 2 months
Actual payback period = 5 months
An ability to do a running total is vital in this case. Would love any advice someone has.
Hi @Daniel_Stieber I’ve been having a similar issue with a need for a running total calculation. Does anyone know if this is a feature/formula that is going to be introduced?
Hey Michael, can you provide some more information what do you want to achieve?
You can use sum() to create a total of a list/column. If you want to just show the total at the end of the table, you can use the the native footer bar of the table. If you want an ongoing total in each row, you can use the way linked above.
I don’t think there is something going to be introduced right now.
If you struggle, you can share a doc/example and I‘ll have a look.
Out of curiosity - Is there a way to combine the PreviousRow formula and the CumulativeTotal formula into one to avoid having an extra column, PreviousRow? I’d like to try an apply that methodology to this section and other areas of my document if so.
@Justin_VanDervort how are you getting your raw bank feeds into Coda? Manually or?
I know one can pay ($5/month) for Tiller to scrape your bank feeds into Google Sheets, and then create a one way sync from that Google Sheet to a Coda doc using Google App Script (thx @Al_Chen_Coda). But I’m wondering if you’ve found a simpler way.
I suspect such functionality in my 3000 row accounting document is what is causing it to slow to a crawl. I’ve ended up deleting the running total columns.
My only use case is to show it in a line a graph. So ideally, rather than adding a running total column to the table, I wish I could just have an option for the chart to show the running total, so something here:
I think there’s a way to do this more efficiently by using an index-lookup approach rather than a find approach.
Make a column called Order that converts your datetime objects into a unique integer. Then Running Total formula can just be thisRow.Value + thisTable.Sort(true, Order).Nth(thisRow.Order - 1).Value
I’ve noticed that when searching for the term “Running Total” on the community, this post shows up as the first suggestion, but it is an unresolved post.
Therefore, I am posting the reference to a related post here, that has indeed been resolved and outlines the solution on how to set up a running tally.
Hopefully this might be of use for others trying to set up a running tally.
The resolved post contains a concise write-up by @cnr on
– how to think about running totals in Coda, and
– which formula to use for them
