Top Spend Payees Graph

Nauset

What is the point of the blue lines in the Top Spend Payee graph? Maybe I have a bad setup or configuration somewhere, but I don't see any value in these lines

What am I missing?

Tom Young

The only thing I've ever figured out (guessed at) is that the lines show the "weight" of each payee's spending, from "heaviest" to "lightest." You'd think, maybe, that percentage figures for each payee might be more informative.

jacobs

I'm not sure what's confusing about this. A bar graph is a pretty standard visual representation of data, using either vertical or horizontal rectangular bars to compare different items.The length or height of each bar is proportional to the value it represents, allowing for easy visual comparison of data points. The Income & Expense card shows (vertical) bars to visually show relative differences in income and expenses for each month; the Top Spending Payees card uses (horizontal) bars to represent relative spending levels for the top payees.

You'd think, maybe, that percentage figures for each payee might be more informative.

I think percentage values could be confusing, because it wouldn't be clear if a value is the percentage of the payees shown or a percentage of all payees. I also don't know if seeing the actual percentage for each payee would be particularly useful. The bar graph lets you get a quick visual of how much less your other top payees received compared to your largest payee.

Nauset

But what is it relative to? So for example the top value is 2261.58. The graph is filled in all the way. Why is that? Is it supposed to be some weight of the 5178 proportion? There just isn't any useful context.

I think if it just showed the dollar value and % of the top 10 would be fine

jacobs

But what is it relative to?

the expenses are relative to each other. That is, your largest Payee is the full width of the chart, and other payees are relative to that amount.

I think it's just to give you a visual representation of your top payees rather than just having a box of text; I don't know that there's any great significance to knowing the my fifth largest payee is half as much as my largest payee. If it were to show each payee's percentage of the top 10 payee spending, that would be better represented in a pie chart, but I'm not sure I'd find that any more informative or useful.