Simple YTD Comparison with Previous YTD

Andrew Peterson
Andrew Peterson
Sixth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant
in SKY Developer General Discussions

Hi all, I'm looking for a little guidance. My DoD looks for one metric almost daily and that's where we are today compared to the same day last year in terms of dollars raised and donors. To do this currently, he opens, edits the report periods to be today this year and the same date the previous year on two different Comparisons and Summary standard reports in RE.

For a while a fringe goal of mine has been to make this easier for him. I was able to build a Power Automate flow that runs the reports, saves them as PDFs in a Google Drive folder then emails him the PDFs every morning. But the problem remains the same, in this scenario, I still have to go edit the report periods before the flow runs for it to be as accurate as possible.

I'm wondering if there is an even easier way to get these metrics to his fingertips? After doing some digging it seems like I have to go down a Power BI or Google Looker Studio route but that seems to mean building a data set of every gift over the past two years to do the calculations.

Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions on an way to go about this using any of the Power products, the Sky API or even a Google environment?

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Answers

  • Austen Brown
    Austen Brown Community All-Star
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 5 PowerUp Challenge: Product Update Briefing Feedback Task 3 bbcon 2025 Attendee Badge

    Recommend you take a look at Power BI, it can integrate with RE NXT (through a custom connector) and/or Power Automate data pulls to bring data in. There is a monthly user group where you can converse with other Power BI users and ask questions - recommending attending that: https://community.blackbaud.com/events/4391-microsoft-power-bi-user-group

  • Andrew Peterson
    Andrew Peterson
    Sixth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    Thanks @Austen Brown, that's what I figured and what I'll continue to look into.

  • Erik Leaver
    Erik Leaver Blackbaud Employee
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 First Reply Name Dropper

    @Andrew Peterson Let me know if you need any help getting started.

  • Alex Wong
    Alex Wong Community All-Star
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 5 Facilitator 3 Raiser's Edge NXT Fall 2025 Product Update Briefing Badge

    if you want a dashboard (containing table, and charts) that sit in RE NXT for your DoD to login and see whenever s/he wants, you can go Power BI route, I would suggest using this template to start where you don't need to build a 24/7 computer as a gateway.

    If you want this report to be formatted in an email for s/he to get each morning as a table of comparison, then Power Automate can do the trick, likely best is to use Query API, can be fully automated without "manual edit first".

  • Carol Grant
    Carol Grant
    Seventh Anniversary Kudos 5 First Reply Name Dropper

    @Andrew Peterson - I thought I would also share what I do. I run a gift exports from RE of gifts for the last 2 years and keep it as static data in an Excel sheet. Then I run an export of the current fiscal year and combine them in Power BI. If I need to refresh the previous years export I can. (adjustments or write offs) but normally a previous year gifts data set doesn't have to be refreshed as often as this years.

    Once in Power BI there are some DAX measures that can be built to help you do this. Here's one where I use SAMEPERIODLASTYEAR and it does the calculation based on gift amount.

    SAMEPERIODLASTYEAR ( DATESBETWEEN ( 'Calendar'[Date], BLANK (), GiftMaxDate ) )

    -Carol

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