Rudimentary statistics

[Continental Sky]

Hi everyone. I was not sure if I should post this in feature requests section, but since I'm still new here, I thought it was better to ask more experienced players first.

While I really enjoy the game, it's addictive so far, I'm oftentimes annoyed by rudimentary statistics that does not allow for proper analysis. Let me try to explain.

Financial reports display the current period (week, month, quarter or year) and three previous periods. The current period is useless, at least for me - it is not complete so it does not give proper picture. So I have to manually select previous period, and then again, 4 periods are not sufficient; I have to scroll back and forth with periods. I would like to see 6 periods next to each other (previous, complete periods, not the current period) as absolute minimum, whereas 12 periods would be nice.

There is sufficient space for more columns, see how columns are extended in below screenshot, and also see how current period skews the picture, it was taken in Tuesday, second day of the week.



So, my issue is that I have a pretty stable airline with profit in each period, and then suddenly it starts recording losses. I need to identify where and why. If I go one week back, it looks like this:



Note that I resized window here, columns are condensed, so if you compare with previous screenshot, there is obviously space to add at least 4 more columns without endangering readability.

There are basically two possibilities, either load factors decrease or Opex increase.

In this case, revenue was stable; it appeared that maintenance cost doubled.





If I go to aircraft page, it says that all aircraft are making profit.





If I go to details page of the worst aircraft, next week estimation does not expect any loss either.



Since "This estimate of next week's earnings is based on routes flown in the last 7 days.", it means that last 7 days were positive, too; but they were not, as seen above, previous two weeks were disastrous.

If all aircraft are generating positive results, why did I drop from 50,000 $ weekly profit to 55,000 $ weekly loss?!

I guess there was some C or possibly D check, but why is it not displayed in these reports? Where can I see it? I can see it in aircraft page, maintenance view, but it shows only the date, not the cost, so I have to go to each individual aircraft page to see it, so it's all too daunting, isn't it...

Furthermore, all profits or losses are shown only for previous week; if aircraft is in maintenance, then there is no data at all. There is no way, or I cannot find it, it might be my fault, who knows, but I was not able to find entire history of an aircraft and to see if and when it started leaking money somewhere.

The same applies to routes, in cases where I noticed drop of revenue. I was not able to properly identify route(s) where load factors dropped, as statistics are unclear, similar to these for aircraft, and provided for last week only, or even no data at all if aircraft is in maintenance.

If this was real airline, having total of 34 high and mid level managers and total of 348 people in Economy and Finance, Corporate communications, Quality, Flight operations and Technical services and maintenance departments, and not being able to provide me with more sensible reports, I guess they wouldn't stay in the company for too long... 

[schro]

The per plane profitability does not consider overhead costs such as staff salaries, rent etc, in calculating the number there. It's also not perfectly accurate for.. well.. just about any management purpose other than seeing comparatively which planes are making you more or less money, which can help identify your profitable routes.

Also, the game financial clock really ticks on a weekly basis. Certain fixed costs land at various times in the week, mostly early on, so you really can't judge overall profitability until the week ends. To determine week over week changes you should look at the different line items for changes.

Some of the monthly overhead costs will change depending on number of days in the month. Salaries, for example, are coated on a monthly basis and charged daily to the income statement. Your daily/weekly salary expense is higher in February on a daily/weekly basis than it is in January because you divide the monthly cost by 28 instead of 31.

There's really not much of a need to look far back on the historical numbers for your airline - the past few weeks are quite sufficient. Switching to monthly or quarterly views isn't all that helpful*.

*Of note, for financials, months, quarters and years do not start based on the calendar month, but on the first Monday of that particular period. So a year may end Sunday January 4, and the next starts Monday January 5. This goes back to the weekly cadence that drives the game financial stats.

Moving on to your specific profit drop analysis - your most profitable plane could be in the shop. It could have turned to February. There could have been a world or local event. If you're a new airline, having an alignment of B checks at the same time can hurt. Fuel costs could have materially changed (unliekly in the dc3 era). You may have just scheduled a bunch of new planes on new routes that have a low sales level/low ri. You might have deployed a 100k/wk marketing campaign. I could keep naming things all day - a full picture of finances would make this obvious.

[schro]

Aaand now that I see the pie charts, likely cause was an expensive check getting paid for along with the coorespondong lack of revenue.

[Continental Sky]

Thank you for taking time to look into the numbers.

Yes, I also guess it was C checks that ruined my profits, but I'm annoyed by the fact that it's not easily identified in income statement, I have to inspect planes and conclude it indirectly, 'here I had ten C checks last three weeks, and here I had double maintenance cost in those three weeks, so it must have been that'... Anyhow, the profits climbed back again, until this time next year...

[schro]

Thank you for taking time to look into the numbers.

Yes, I also guess it was C checks that ruined my profits, but I'm annoyed by the fact that it's not easily identified in income statement, I have to inspect planes and conclude it indirectly, 'here I had ten C checks last three weeks, and here I had double maintenance cost in those three weeks, so it must have been that'... Anyhow, the profits climbed back again, until this time next year...

If you're continually growing, once you hit the 50-100 plane fleet size, you really shouldn't feel the effects of C checks anymore. In the DC-3 era, profit margins are also typically sky high (and the shrink as time marches forward), so if you're bouncing between a profit and loss due to a handful of C checks in another year, you've probably got more significant issues to deal with.