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Comparison in Fina Block

Comparison is a powerful feature in Fina that allows you to compare your spending and income across different time periods, categories, and profiles. It helps you understand your financial habits and make informed decisions about your spending.

Life is full of comparisons​

To understand your finances better, you need to comparison in many scenarios, you may wonder such questions:

  1. How much I spent in this month compared to last month?
  2. How much I spent in this month compared to my budget?
  3. How is my monthly spending on food compared to the same time as last year?
  4. How is my grocery spending ratio compared to other people?
  5. How is my spending on food compared to my income?
  6. ...

Comparison is the tool that gives us the reference to understand our current situation better, so to make better decisions.

tip

Comparison is a long-term investment area for Fina. Fina's final goal is to provide a comprehensive comparison tool that allows you compare horizontally and vertically, along time line or compared to peers. This document will be updated to reflect the latest features and improvements.

Timeline Comparison​

Fina allows you to easily turn on comparison view for any time line you have in a Fina Block.

Let's take a look at the example below: Comparison View

In this example, there are 3 places calls your attention:

  1. Comparison Toggle: The selection will be available when current block is a time line without breakdown, below are the conditions to meet the requirement:
    • Block Chart: Bar or Line chart.
    • Breakdown by: None.
    • Time series: NOT None.

The available comparison options are:

  • Previous Year: Compare current date range to the same period of the previous year.
  • Previous Period: Compare the current date range with the previous period defined by Time series unit.
    • Day, Week, Month, Quarter, Year: The previous period is just current range shift back to 1 unit of the selection.

  1. Color Palette: The color palette of the block. When comparison is turned on, only the first color is used for current range.

    1. Current: The first color of the selected palette.
    2. Comparison: The comparion color (opacity applied) to the current color, currently 25% opacity.

  2. Time Label: You will notice the time label is changed to show the comparison time range along with the current date range. Something like Current Year <> Previous Year (2024-01/01 - 2024-05/20), this example means:

    1. Current Year: The current date range is all time in current year, dynamically updated depending on the current date.
    2. Comparison: The compared date range is the same time range but in the past period.

Steps to Create a Timeline Comparison​

Let's use the above example as the target we want to create and place in a Fina page, here are the steps:

  1. Go to a page you want to create the comparison block.
  2. type / to open the block selection menu.
  3. Select Time Series Bar Chart.
  4. In the Block Edit panel on the right side, take below actions:
    1. Click "+ Add Metric" to add a metric in the Metrics pane.
    2. In the Dropdown list, select Total Income which is a pre-populated metric provided by Fina.
  5. Now go to Data Setting panel:
    1. Select Month in the Time Series dropdown list.
    2. Select Previous Year in the Comparison dropdown list.

Now you should see the same or similar block as the above example. Some optional styles you can apply: 6. Go to Block Size, choose Large size which takes full width of the page. 7. Go to Color Palette, choose whatever color palette you like.

tip

Comparison opens a new way to look at your data, it is a powerful and fun! Do not hesitate to play with it and share your experience with us, anytime at Fina Reddit or email us at Fina Support.