Sankey Diagram: the four measure components

Understanding the Components of a Sankey Diagram

When working with a Sankey diagram, there are four key measure components to understand:

1. Actual Component: This defines the timeframe for the actual value being used, such as “Current Month (CM)” or “Year-to-Date (YTD)”. For example, in the diagram above, the $66.56 million for B2B revenue represents the YTD value.

2. Comparison Component: This determines the basis of comparison, such as “vs Previous Year (PY)” or “vs Plan”. In the example, the 14.89% increase in B2B revenue represents the YTD increase compared to PY ($56.65 million).

3. Foreign Exchange (FX) Component: This indicates whether you are comparing:

   • Overall values,

   • Underlying values (excluding FX impact), or

   • FX impact only.
     

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4. Colour Component: This defines whether the variances are displayed using the standard rules (as shown above) or customized variance rules (as seen below).

Note that an increase vs PY in costs is in red (reduces net income) whereas an increase vs PY in revenue or profits is in green (increases net income).

Completing the Sankey measures template

You might want to start by keeping it simple—creating a single Sankey measure view. However, this template allows you to expand and evolve as your requirements grow. Below is an example of a completed template for two Sankey views:

Actual Component Code	Actual Component	Comparison Component Code	Comparison Component	Fx Component Code	Fx Component	Colour Rules Component	Colour Rules Component Code
1	CM	1	vs PY	2	Underlying	1	Standard
5	FY Fcst BU	2	vs Plan	1	Overall	2	Variance

For each of the four components (Actual, Comparison, FX, and Colour), there are two columns:

• One column contains a unique code,

• The other contains the component's name.

  
  

For instance, for the first line of the Actual component, "CM" (Current Month) is used as the name, while the corresponding code is 1.

How the four components create unique code and measure name

In the next post, we’ll combine these four codes to create unique Sankey measure codes and corresponding names. For example, in the first line of the table, the code is 1121, while in the second line, it’s 5212.

Each unique combination of components forms a specific measure name. For instance, the first line—"CM vs PY Underlying Standard"—is named based on its four components:

• CM for the Actual component,

• vs PY for the Comparison component,

• Underlying for the FX component, and

• Standard for the Color component.

Actual Component Code	Actual Component	Comparison Component Code	Comparison Component	Fx Component Code	Fx Component	Colour Rules Component	Colour Rules Component Code	Sankey Code	Sankey View Full
1	CM	1	vs PY	2	Underlying	1	Standard	1121	CM vs PY Underlying Standard
5	FY Fcst BU	2	vs Plan	1	Overall	2	Variance	5212	FY Fcst BU vs Plan Overall Variance

Conclusion

Now that we’ve defined the four components and their respective inputs, we can proceed to complete the Power BI file with these measures.