Year-over-Year Growth YoY

Year-over-year growth compares a period with the same period one year earlier. Usually a month against the same month last year. If March brought in 120,000 and last March brought 100,000, growth is twenty per cent. People write it as YoY. The reason for the year gap is season. Comparing March with February only tells you that spring is not winter.

Season is why the comparison exists, and it is also what breaks it. The Islamic calendar moves about eleven days earlier every year, so Ramadan and Eid drift across the western months. Last year Ramadan may have filled March, this year most of it fell in February. Compare March with March and you will read a fall that never happened. The fix is simple. Compare Ramadan with Ramadan, counted from its first day, and Eid week with Eid week. The same care applies to school holidays and to sale weeks that move by a few days.

The other trap is your own past. If you ran a heavy discount last May, this May will look weak beside it even when the business is healthier. That old month was probably busy at a thin margin. Nobody remembers a promotion a year later, which is why the number lies so quietly. Keep a plain calendar of every discount, campaign and stock shortage, one line each. Linkysoft asks for that list before writing any growth report, and it is nearly always missing. Whoever runs your digital marketing should keep the same list.

Percentages on small numbers are theatre. Four orders becoming eight is a hundred per cent growth and tells you almost nothing. Below about thirty orders a month, read the count of orders, not the percentage. Compare like with like as well. If you opened a second branch or added a new sales channel in between, the two months are not the same business.

None of this works if the record is thin. Storek keeps the date, the branch and the sales channel on every order, so the comparison can be rebuilt honestly months later. Linkysoft is often asked for this report long after the fact, and the answer depends entirely on what was written down at the time. When an owner wants the promotion calendar sitting next to the sales curve, that is a small web application, and it is usually the cheapest report a business ever pays for.