A running balance in Business Objects

I think it's quite clear by now, that it is my objective, never ever to need Excel -- well, almost. The charts in Excel do exceed BO's, but math -- naaaah.

Our next venture, is calculating a running balance.

In a running balance, we have a series of deposits and a series of withdrawals and we want to
keep track of the total of our balance at all times.

Here's how:

First, we need two columns. One has our deposits, the other has the withdrawals.

Now, we want to show a third column, with our balance -- on 1/1/2013, this should be : 180, on 2/1/2013, this should be -620 etc.

This is laughably easy really -- since BusinessObjects has a function Excel doesn't have: RunningSum

=runningsum([Deposit]) - runningsum([Withdrawal])

The result is :

In Excel this would be something like :

A	B	C
Deposits	Withdrawals	Balance
$1,000	$625	=SUM(A2,-B2)
$1000	740	=SUM(C2,A3,-B3)

Looks like our balance is in the red -- but with the economic times, that seems right :)

Cheers folks

Peter