Leighton Ventures

An example of a misleading management tool is the ordinary monthly sales chart.

People think up is good and down is bad, but what if the chart goes up less than the same month last year? What if that continues for 12 months? When will you finally notice that your growth has slowed to a crawl? Too late is the answer. A simple tool called the trailing 12 months chart (T12M) will forever solve this problem. Where ordinary charts regularly lie to you, the T12M always tells you the truth.

Well, I have found this T12M chart to be very insightful for forecasting and understanding my business and my client’s businesses. In fact, utilizing Excel is nice. But, there is a better, more interactive way of looking and documenting your sales.

Why not make notes on why sales went up, and went down? Below is a link to an easy way capturing this data to help CEOs track their company’s monthly sales, per Kraig Kramer’s T12M.

Creating your T12M Spreadsheet in Google Docs.

Google Spreadsheet

Adding an Interactive Time Series Chart

Interactive Time Series Chart

Check out the tutorial on creating an Interactive Time Series Chart.

Now you can use the power of Google Finance for your company’s monthly sales and trailing 12 months sales numbers. Simply rollover the line graph and the top right of the gadget displays the value.

You can also make notes to document the reason why sales increased or decreased so you can track all the necessary variables. For example, in October 2008 this company obtained 4 new clients and bumped the sales to $16,000.

Let us know if you need Leighton Ventures to customize your company’s T12M chart.