As Is & As Of Dashboards in Tableau

What is the difference between As Is and As Of?

One of the strengths of Business Intelligence is that it quickly provides insights into data trends over time. With Business Intelligence, for example, you can immediately see what this year’s revenue is and how it compares to last year’s. Such insights are possible because transactional data contains a date, such as an invoice date or general ledger date.

There is often also data that is not linked to a date, such as information about products or the current status of a machine. This is what we call ‘As Is,’ meaning the current situation. An example of this is the current balance of outstanding invoices. You consult As Is data to check the status. However, sometimes you also want to know how something has developed over time. Are there more or fewer products than last year, for example? Are machines experiencing more frequent breakdowns? How is customer payment behavior changing? This is what we call ‘As Of.’ Here, you look at the situation at a specific point in the past.

Configuring As Is & As Of Dashboards

Tableau makes it very easy to gain these kinds of insights. In the world of data warehousing, ‘snapshots’ are often used for this purpose. When the ETL process (Extract, Transform, Load—a process by which data is extracted from source systems, transformed, and loaded into a data warehouse) extracts data from the source systems, it is possible to take these snapshots. It is important to carefully consider the frequency of these snapshots, how long they should remain available, and the volume of data.

A customer once asked us for insight into their inventory turnover rate. To gain this insight, a daily inventory balance over a two-year period was required. However, there were 160,000 inventory items, resulting in a dataset of almost 120 million records. A powerful server can certainly handle this, but the question is whether the benefits outweigh the costs. The same insight might also be achieved with a monthly snapshot. It is also important to consider cleaning up data, as not all historical data is still relevant.

As Is & As Of Dashboards in Tableau

With these snapshots, it is easy to visualize trends over time in Tableau. You can also compare the current status with any snapshot from the past. This allows you to derive trends and use all the other functionalities of Tableau, such as setting notifications.

Below is an example of a Tableau dashboard where we have incorporated both As Is and As Of functionality. This dashboard provides an overview of debtors. We have designed it in such a way that you can quickly see the current status (As Is). When you open the dashboard, the most recent data is displayed automatically. Do you want to view the status at a specific point in the past? Then you can set the As Of parameter to a desired date.

Try out the interactive dashboard for yourself below!

Try our interactive dashboard yourself!

• As Is: You can quickly see the current status
• As Of: Select a specific date in the past. For instance, go to 07/09/2022 or 31/07/2021 and discover the differences.