16|TABLEAU – Tax Prep Startup

[Erick_Sizilio]

BYU Student Author: @Erick_Sizilio
Reviewers: @Nate, @Parker_Sherwood
Estimated Time to Solve: 20 Minutes

We provide the solution to this challenge using:

• Tableau

Need a program? Click here.

Overview
You are a new hire at a tax accounting firm that is expanding rapidly. The company has been successful because it hires the exact number of employees needed for each year. Your boss asked you to create a simple dashboard in Tableau that shows how many employees will be needed by country/state. Your boss provided two tables: 1) Number of tax returns to be completed by country and by state, and 2) Number of tax returns each employee within a country can complete. (This differs from country to country because of the level of training, tax code complexity, and technology available to them)

Instructions

1. Download the data
2. Load it into Tableau
3. Join the two tables
4. Create two separate sheets as follows: 1) Show how many employees will be needed by country/state on a table, and 2) the total number of employees needed by country/state on a map!
5. Combine these sheets into a dashboard

Data Files

• Challenge16_Data.xlsx

Suggestions and Hints

When calculating the number of employees needed, ensure that you round up any numbers. A fraction of a person can’t do any work . You can round up by using the ceiling function)

Solution

Challenge16_Solution.twbx
Solution Video: Challenge 16|TABLEAU – Tax Prep Startup

[Donovon]

Great challenge! I had fun thinking through the problems and making it look decent on a dashboard. You can see my solution below!

Tax Prep Startup - Solution.twbx (57.8 KB)

[Nate]

There aren’t as many challenges in Tableau as in the other programs, so I really like it whenever a new one gets posted. This one didn’t disappoint! It was a great way for me to get introduced to building a simple dashboard.

Rather than a chart for the first visualization, I decided that I like a bar graph a little more because it allows me to coordinate the colors with those on the map while getting the same information I would from just the chart alone. I’ve shared a screenshot below:

[Hyrum]

Great Challenge Erik! It’s always nice to refresh my map skills in tableau, it always takes me a minute to remember to just drag the location to the main display. I made a dashboard to show both at once, and here it is:

[Kennedy_Allgood]

Tax Tableau Solution.twbx (52.4 KB)

[Grant_Knight]

Enjoyed doing this challenge. Thanks! It was really helpful to have more experience with data visualization. I had never used the subtotal feature before and thought that was really cool yet not hard to do!

[Sierra_Smith]

I enjoyed this challenge in Tableau! I appreciate that this challenge encouraged displaying the same data through different visualizations.