What does YTD mean?
As you know, Year to date is the full form of YTD. YTD information is important for analyzing business trends over time and it refers to the period between the first day of the calendar year and the current date. The fiscal year might not necessarily begin on 1st January but it's not a matter of the dates, Year-to-date covers the first day of the year until the last day of calculation.
A lot of online store owners are usually confused about what timeframe is a good measure of understanding if a certain metric like Sales, Profit, or Order count is increasing.
YTD is a good timeframe to set a goal and track it so that your business grows over time. While MTD - Month to Date is a good timeframe to make sure you're going to be able to meet your expenses on a monthly basis.
Essentially, YTD used together with MTD and lifetime in-store reporting for various KPIs is a proven way to run a profitable online store.
Read More: Profitable Revenue
Benefits of Year to Date
YTD are very useful because they provide a way to check on the financial health of a store.
Year-to-date statements: YTD statements calculate your eCommerce store finance values since the first day of the fiscal year.
Year-to-date returns: YTD returns calculate the profit or loss of your store from investment since the first day of the calendar year.
Year-to-date earnings: YTD earnings calculate the income of an individual, supplier, or business since the first day of the calendar year. It's important that you track and check on the financial health of your Shopify stores and help you achieve your goals with Konigle tools.
Year-to-date net pay: YTD net pay calculates all your store expenses along with the charges and fees
Year to Date Formula and Calculation
The formula for calculating the YTD return is as follows:
YTD = (Metric Value on Specific Date / Metric Value on first day of the year) -1
This YTD formula can be applied to any situation in which the store owner wants to calculate the change in value from the start of the year to a specified date.
How do you calculate YTD?
1. Collect data on your store's sales.
2. Use the formula of YTD to put your data.
3. Solve and get value according to the formula
4. Covert the values in percentage
5. Analyze and compare with previous data.
YTD calculation example
Mostly YTD evaluation can be determined through simple addition. For example, if an e-commerce store wishes to calculate its year-to-date sales, it would simply add up the sales values for every budget period since the start of the calendar year.
Steps to analyze profit are to divide the specific date value by the starting value at the beginning of the year. This gives you a fraction representation of the year-to-date sales growth.
The next step is to raise that fraction to the power of twelve and divided it by the number of months that are gone. lastly, Subtract 1 and multiply the result by 100 to get a percentage value of sales.
For example, suppose your sales value started the year at $1000 and it currently has a value of $1030 on Sept 30. Then divide $1030 by $1000 to get 1.03, and raise that to the power of 1.33 (12/9) to get 1.04. This, shows your sales are on track with annual 4% growth.