Introducing the Redmond Aged Debt Profile Chart

I was working with a client recently and one of the requirements was to have a report showing aged debt by client.  Most people who have worked as report developers will be familiar with this type of chart - showing the debt values broken down into buckets, quite often of 30 days.  Something like this:

This type of chart is very straightforward to produce in QlikView and something that we would do quite regularly.

While I was building it, I was thinking to myself, "this isn't very visually appealing, there must be something that I can do to enhance it".

So, this is what I did - get rid of most of the numbers, and replace them with blocks.

The first column here is essentially a bar chart.  This gives the user and immediate view of the relative sizes of the debts.

The next columns show the relative size of the values within the buckets.

With the two visualizations within the one chart, the user - probably a credit controller - can scan the page and see where the most effort needs to be made to chase debt.  Of course, being a QlikView Straight Table, each of the buckets is independently sortable so I can quickly find out all of my clients who have most of their debt in the higher buckets.

I have had a good scout around the internet (via Google, of course) and haven't come across anything similar to this for this purpose.  Therefore I am going to claim it for myself and get all the glory ;-)

I would love to hear people's thoughts about this chart and ideas about where else it might be applied.

There is an example QlikView document showing how the chart is built available for download from the QlikView Community.

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Stephen Redmond is CTO of CapricornVentis a QlikView Elite Partner. We are always looking for the right people to join our team.
Follow me on Twitter: @stephencredmond