Bullet Chart

The monthly business review asks more than whether a line hit plan. It asks how the line compares with the latest forecast and with last year. Add a Forecast or a Prior year field next to the Target and every row carries all four scenarios: actual, plan, forecast and prior year, with prior year drawn as a dot or as a bar behind the actual. The labels follow IBCS notation (AC, PL, FC, PY), with absolute and relative variance columns and an optional variance pin column next to the rows.

Forecast and Prior year comparisons are premium features. They are fully unlocked while you edit the report, so you can build and judge the whole review page before buying.

Costs, scrap rate, lead time and incident rates are good when they fall. Switch lower-is-better on for the whole visual, or map a Lower is better field to set it per row, and the bands, colours, variance sign and gap all flip for those rows. A plant scorecard can mix on-time delivery, where higher is better, with scrap rate, where lower is better, in one visual without any sign tricks in DAX.

Mixed units are handled the same way. A Unit or format field gives each row its own unit or format string, so one scorecard reads 96.1 %, 12.6 days and 0.42 per 200k h, with percentage variances shown in percentage points. The premium % of target scale then puts KPIs in different units on one axis with a shared 100 % line.

A year-to-date actual at 70 % of the annual target can be ahead or behind, depending on the date. Pace to target draws a run-rate projection of where each row will land and marks where it should be by today. Elapsed time comes from the viewer's clock as year, quarter or month to date, from a fixed percentage or from an Elapsed % field, and the status of each row is judged against the expected-to-date value rather than the full-year target.

Pace is a premium feature, together with a trend sparkline per row or tile with the target line, and a summary sentence such as "9 of 15 off target. Largest gap: Scrap rate (+31.8%)" that tells the reader what the chart shows.

Status never depends on colour alone: each status has its own icon shape (a circle with a tick, a triangle with an exclamation mark, a diamond with a cross) as well as its own colour. Every meaningful colour pair in all four themes is checked against WCAG contrast in the test suite. In Windows high-contrast mode the visual uses the host palette only and draws bands as outlines.

The whole visual is one keyboard tab stop: arrow keys move between rows, Home and End jump to the ends, Enter or Space selects and cross-filters, and Shift+F10 or the context-menu key opens the context menu. The format pane and labels ship in 20 languages.