How to Measure Target vs. Actual Sales

When measuring target versus actual sales, typically what people want to know is how does the actual compare to target in absolute and percentage terms?. Often a variance table works well for this. The format usually has columns in this order:

• Metric
• Actual
• Target
• Variance
• Variance %

In terms of the period to measure, most people want to know actual vs. target for the last period (e.g., month, quarter) and "year-to-date (YTD)", which addresses the questions:

1. how did we do last month?
2. how does performance since the beginning of the year compare to our annual target?`

Here's an example variance table that addresses both of those questions:

If the data is for actual and target is available monthly, you can show a companion line chart with actual and target as separate series so that the business stakeholder can see visually which in months actual sales were higher/lower than target (and roughly by how much). A moving average can be useful for trend analysis and forecasting purposes but often doesn't address the question that stakeholders have and can confuse things, so I usually don't include it.