# Effective way to visualize net growth/profit/income?

A non-profit has donors with monthly commitments, which you can think of as subscriptions. What is the best way to show for each month new acquisitions, cancels, and net growth? The relationship is

 net growth = new acquisitions - cancels


The same time of chart could be appropriate for net profit (business) or net income (personal finances).

The first (and more important) problem is the design: it must be attractive and easily understood by non-technical people. The design is really the answer to this question.

The second problem, which is not required in the answer, is the implementation: I prefer to implement this in SAS, Excel, SharePoint, or some JavaScript library--- or maybe R.

One story behind the chart is new acquisitions have a high cancel rate, so they both help and hurt net growth. (However, the cancels do not distinguish whether the commitment was new or old.)

My boss drew this example chart:

Here is a new design with an idea from xan's post. In this design, cancels are implicit, so I was able to simplify by eliminating one chart element.

This chart from an EU report is similar: it shows imports, exports, and the trade balance.

Here is what may be my final version:

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Also please don't simultaneously cross post at other forums, forums.flowingdata.com/topic/… –  Andy W May 8 '12 at 19:11
@Andy Why not? That's not an SE site. Cross-posting across SE sites is discouraged because we have a controlled mechanism for migration. We can't migrate to or from other sites. –  whuber May 8 '12 at 19:20
@whuber, IMO whether it is on the Stack exchange sites is immaterial. The reason for discouraging cross posting is not because a question can be migrated, it is because it is a waste of people's time to answer questions that have already been answered. –  Andy W May 8 '12 at 19:35
That's a suitable topic for a meta discussion, @Andy. A quick search on Meta indicates cross-posting policy always refers to SE sites only. Also, virtually every question here has already been asked and answered somewhere else, so the implication of your argument is that we're mostly wasting our time here... –  whuber May 8 '12 at 19:41
A quick search on meta stack overflow suggests the same "netiquette" for cross-posting to other forums/list-serves applies in general as it does to sister stack sites (see one example here, you can look through the cross-posting tag for other related discussion). To be explicit, one should absolutely link between both questions (and update each site if an answer occurs at the other site). Also preferably it should only be done when a suitable answer has not been obtained at one site after some time cont. –  Andy W May 8 '12 at 20:01