Hello! I like the Period Comparison sheet but I’m wondering if anyone has done something similar with descriptions? Meaning, I can compare all my amazon purchases this month with my previous month, previous year, or ytd, etc…
I know of the workarounds, like setting a specific amazon category or using tags and the tags report sheet (although it’s not exactly the same). Obviously this could get tricky since amazon has a bunch of different descriptions. Maybe comparison by Merchant would be better.
Anyone have a recommendation or a sheet that already does this?
welcome @tilleruser,
I’m not aware of an existing sheet out there that does this in the way the period comparison sheet does, but you might be able to sort of get at this with a pivot table?
This is a good idea for a Show & Tell too, @jono @randy @jpfieber @cculber2 @Brad.warren
Any takers?
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Sure, I just did a quick proof of concept, I’ll try to get it posted this afternoon.
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I just posted a Show & Tell with a solution that will hopefully meet @tilleruser needs, pending approval. Hopefully this is what you had in mind! Even if it’s not, now that I’ve created it, I’m having fun using it to easily do comparisons I wasn’t able to before, so hopefully others might find it useful!
Was just approved! @tilleruser , checkout Transaction Comparison - Show & Tell and let me know if it works for what you are looking for!
This is awesome! So this isn’t exactly what I asked for but your smarts got me 99% of the way. So originally I want a way to compare the descriptions of transactions. With a few modifications to your sheet, I’m able to do just that.
I added a new “Description” input field and changed the formula to:
=QUERY({INDIRECT(S6),INDIRECT(S7),INDIRECT(S8),INDIRECT(S9),INDIRECT(S10)}, "select Col1,Col2,Col3,Col5,Col4 where " & if(H9="","","Col2 matches '" & H9 & "' and ") & if(H5="","","Col3 = '" & H5 & "' and ") & if(H7="","","Col5 CONTAINS '" & H7 & "' and ") & "Col1 >= date '"&TEXT(H12,"yyyy-mm-dd")&"' and Col1 <= date '"&TEXT(H14,"yyyy-mm-dd")&"' Order by Col1 Label Col1 'Date', Col2 'Description', Col3 'Category', Col4 'Amount', Col5 'Tags'")
All I am adding here is & if(H9="","","Col2 matches '" & H9 & "' and ")
.
Using the description of .*(Amazon|Amzn).*
, this gives me these results:
This is so perfect and versatile. Thank you so much for your work and figuring this out for me!
Glad I could help, it’s a tool I’m finding useful as well. I love your addition (ie your original intent)! I just added it to mine and to the downloadable template, great functionality!
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