Our company has spent the last business quarter implementing Monday.com across our business and are going to roll out soon.
What attracted us to Monday.com in part were the user friendly dashboards.
I am coming to realize at the last moment that the percentage average values for widgets and group summaries are unweighted. For the alpha board summary feature in MondayLabs, there are not even average %s, only sums (?!)
This renders the tool completely unuseable for any business planning purposes. I am astounded that calculating an average profit margin % appears to be an unavailable feature in Monday.com.
To demonstrate this, I entered some dummy data to show an extreme case.
For the group kickoff, that represents our phase:
Total Revenue = $162,000
Total Profit = $160,304
That would give us a Profit Margin of ~99%
Yet the profit Margin % average, represented by the group summary, shows an unweighted ~69%.
This is also not resolvable via Dashboards or Widgets.
There are some cockamamy solutions that involve using Integromat/Zapier to trigger automations to create another column total, for which I could add another column in order to get this data.
This could work if it was for one board. But we are a company that does over 20 projects a year and we need to see this data aggregated, and setting up real time automations every single time we set up a new project board is not an acceptable solution.
Please, let me know if I am going insane – are weighted averages and summary totals of weighted %s at all possible without some intense out-of-the-box solution?
This definitely seems odd! Would you be able to share the formula you have input in the formula column? It looks like we just need to make some adjustments to your formula in order to get a more accurate result.
I understand your pain! The group summary feature is relatively basic and doesn’t include things like weighting.
There are multiple solutions to this however, and they don’t all require complex integrations!
One standard approach to solving this would be to create another board that holds aggregated data.
Based on your example, you could do the following:
Create a board called “Phases”.
Create items for each of your phases (“kickoff”, “discovery”, “planning” etc.)
Create a “two-way” connection between your Phases board and the board you shared here.
Connect each line item to the appropriate phase (i.e. all the items in your screenshot would be connected to the “Kickoff” item on the other board).
Now on your Phases board, you can create mirror columns and choose how to aggregate the data from the other board (sum, avg, min, max etc.). By using mirror columns to sum the est. Revenue and est. Profit columns, you could create a formula column on the Phases board that would give a total est. Profit Margin.
This all might sound a little long-winded and counter-intuitive, but there are good reasons for this. I think your frustration is common, in that people are more familiar working with spreadsheets. However, monday.com is a database. It takes a while, but when everything clicks and you start associating data points with specific entities and putting them in a hierarchy, it starts to make more sense.
Feel free to reach out if you want some help with your solution, whether it’s integrations, architecture, or just a bit of workshopping.
