Global Superstore — Performance & Profit Leakage
A four-page Power BI report over 51,290 order lines that answers a question the sales chart hides: revenue nearly doubled in four years, so why did margin go backwards?
This project can be shown in full. It uses a public dataset with no sensitive content, so every figure, method and result on this page is the real thing — the visuals are screenshots of the working output, not rebuilds.
Context
Global Superstore is a four-year transactional file — 51,290 order lines across seven markets. The obvious dashboard is a sales trend, and the obvious conclusion is that things are going well: sales grew 26.3% and orders 28.7% year on year.
That reading is wrong, or at least incomplete. Over the same period the profit margin moved down 0.3 points. A business can grow itself into a worse position, and the report’s job was to make that visible rather than let the revenue line tell a flattering story on its own.
Approach
- Lead with the contradiction. The subtitle states it outright: “sales nearly doubled in four years while margin moved 0.7 points”. A dashboard that buries its own headline is a report nobody reads twice.
- Make the loss a first-class KPI. Profit leakage — the value given away in discounts on loss-making lines — sits in the KPI row beside sales and profit, not in a footnote. It is the only red tile on the page, deliberately.
- One axis, always. Sales and profit are plotted together in dollars on a single scale rather than on a dual axis. Profit being a thin sliver against revenue is the finding; a second axis would have hidden it by rescaling.
- Margin at the bar end. Category and market bars are sized by revenue but labelled with margin, so a big-but-thin segment is impossible to miss.
- Four pages: Overview, Where the Profit Goes, Geography, Product.
The four pages
Built on the public Kaggle Global Superstore dataset — 51,290 order lines, FY2011–FY2014. Real screenshots of the working report.
1 Performance overview
2 Where the profit goes
3 Geography
4 Product
Outcome
−$920K profit leakage identified
The report isolates $920K of profit leakage — and shows it growing at 26.2%, almost exactly in step with sales. That is the crux: the discounting behaviour driving growth is scaling the loss alongside it.
Two further findings have direct commercial consequences. Furniture returns 7.0% margin against Technology’s 14.0% on comparable revenue, and Q4 carries 34% of the year with February as the trough — so a discount policy set as an annual average is wrong for both ends of the calendar.
What I’d do differently
The dataset has no cost-to-serve, so “profit” here is gross of logistics. Some of what looks like a margin problem in the bulky Furniture category is probably a shipping problem, and I cannot separate the two from this file alone.
I would also want the discount approval chain. Knowing that $920K leaked is useful; knowing which desk authorised it is what actually changes behaviour.