Roll-up

The hierarchy a sales measure is summed through: account to person to team to region to company. A roll-up is trusted only when every level sums to the same total.

DefinitionThe hierarchy a sales measure is summed through: account to person to team to region to company. A roll-up is trusted only when every level sums to the same total.

The identity

total = Σ regions = Σ teams = Σ people = Σ accounts

Every level is computed from the same row-level file, so the identity holds by construction. When it does not, one of five things has happened: a value that is not a number, a row missing a level, a member under two parents, a duplicated row, or levels built from different sources.

Why it is asserted

A roll-up that is assumed to add up is the source of the meeting where two reports disagree. A roll-up that is asserted on every file, with the variance shown at the level where it appears, ends that meeting.

Dimensions are not levels

Product is a dimension, not a level of the tree: a product appears under many accounts. Date is another. The tree is region, team, person, account. Product and date cut across it.

How it is computed

A measure is summed from account to person to team to region to company. Every row must have a value at every level, and each level's total must equal the others and the control total.

Example

Accounts sum to $41.2 million, people to $40.6 million. Three accounts with no owner, worth $0.6 million, explain the difference and are listed.

Where it goes wrong

Percentages averaged up the hierarchy instead of recomputed from summed numerators and denominators.

Articles that use this term

Board and management reporting

A board narrative with a citation on every number: how to draft the commercial pack from reconciled figures

A method for writing the quarterly commercial narrative so every figure carries a citation to the calculation that produced it: the reconciled roll-up as the source, the narrative structure, the citation format that survives export, and why the model writes sentences but never numbers.

16 Sept 20263 min read AI and self-service analytics

A weekly sales digest worth reading: what a good one looks like, line by line

An annotated example of a weekly sales digest built from computed tables: the header that states the period and the checks, ten movements each with the measure, the level, the change, the threshold and the citation, the three lists that follow, untouched, slipped and dormant, the line that says what did not move, and the footer with the definition version. What each element is for, and the version of the same digest that nobody reads.

16 Sept 20263 min read Data quality and reconciliation

Account hierarchy: parents, subsidiaries and the level you actually sell to

How to build and use an account hierarchy for sales analytics: the levels that exist in most customers, group, legal entity, site, department, the one level where the buying decision is made and every measure is computed, the levels beneath kept as dimensions, the dated parent mapping that survives acquisitions, the identity that revenue sums identically at every level, and the two mistakes that produce forty customers where there is one and one where there are forty.

16 Sept 20263 min read Coverage and territory

Account penetration rate: formula, denominators and a worked example

Account penetration rate defined, accounts buying over accounts in a stated universe, the four denominators it is computed against and what each answers, the target list, the estate, the segment universe and the installed base, a worked example per rep against a target list, the roll-up, the identity to the universe file, and why a penetration rate with no stated universe is a percentage of nothing.

16 Sept 20262 min read How-to guides

Answer-first writing for commercial measures: the template behind every page on this site

The seven-part template every measure page on this site follows, and why: the answer in one paragraph, the formula in a line, the rows needed with identifiers only, one worked table, the roll-up and its identity, the four mistakes, and the three questions answered in full. What each part is for, the order and why it is fixed, the length each part gets, and how a company can use the same template for its own definitions document.

16 Sept 20264 min read Wallet share and penetration · Sports

Asset fit and hospitality utilisation per partner for sports organisations

How a club, league or venue measures which commercial assets each partner buys against the profile of partners like them, watches hospitality renewals with no contact, and tracks box and seat utilisation per fixture from the CRM and ticketing exports, reconciled to commercial revenue.

16 Sept 20263 min read