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Running the business

Notes on your charts

Pin what you did to the day you did it, so a spike still means something months later.

A graph shows what happened. It never shows why. A jump in the third week of March is meaningless six months later unless somebody wrote down that the radio advert ran then.

Chart notes are how you write it down — pinned to the exact day, on the chart itself, where you will actually see it next time you look.

Pinning a note

  1. Open Sales

    Go there, and scroll to the chart.

  2. Press “Pin to a day”

    The chart's columns become clickable.

  3. Click the day it happened

    The one you want to explain — the spike, or the day the campaign started.

  4. Write what was happening

    Short and factual: “Radio advert started”, “Market closed”, “New price list”.

  5. Pick a colour and save

    A marker appears on that day, and the note is listed underneath.

Tip There is a second way in. “Type a date” skips the clicking, for when you already know the date and would rather not hunt for the column.

Worked example: an advertising campaign

The most useful thing to annotate, because it is the thing you will want to judge later.

  1. The day it starts, pin a note

    “Radio advert — Wazobia FM, two weeks”. Do it on the day, not from memory afterwards.

  2. Pin the day it ends too

    Without an end, a rise three weeks later looks like it might still be the advert.

  3. Come back in a month

    The markers sit on the chart. You can see what the line did between them.

The chart will not tell you the advert worked Nothing here calculates “revenue rose 18% because of this”, and that is deliberate. That same fortnight also held a payday, a public holiday, and whatever your competition was doing. Presenting that arithmetic as a result would be a claim the data cannot support. The note gives you the honest version: here is what happened, and here is what we were doing at the time.

What is worth a note

  • Anything you spent money on — adverts, sponsorship, a promotion, a discount week
  • Anything that changed your prices — a new price list, a supplier increase
  • Anything outside your control — a market closure, a fuel shortage, a public holiday, a competitor opening nearby
  • Anything that changed how you sell — a new branch, a new rep, a new storefront layout
Note The test is simple: if you would be annoyed at yourself for not remembering it in six months, pin it. Notes cost nothing and the day they earn their keep is the day somebody asks why last quarter looked like that.

Who can add them

Anyone who can see the chart can read the notes. Adding and deleting needs the same permission as the rest of your reporting — see Staff & permissions.

On the platform's own investor view the same notes appear, and there only WeSelling staff can write them — somebody reading the figures should not be able to annotate the company's charts.