Earnings analysis
EBITDA Bridge
Walk from one period’s EBITDA to the next through the lines that moved it. Depreciation, interest, tax and anything else below the line is marked, excluded, and still shown — because a pasted profit and loss arrives carrying them.
Input data
One row per profit and loss line. Fill Group to bar the chart by division or cost type.
A multiplier. Choose the scale your pack is written in, then type the figures as they appear in it: 8 under Millions is calculated as 8,000,000. Changing the scale rewrites the boxes and leaves every amount where it was, so switching never moves the answer. Exports carry full amounts.
Enter a published figure to check the lines against it. Any difference is reported and never used to adjust a driver.
Sign convention
Enter income as positive amounts. Enter expenses, D&A, interest and tax as positive amounts — the cost of the line. Nature decides the sign in the walk.
Do not paste a signed profit and loss unless you use the repair action. A negative income line is a credit note and is included as signed income.
| Line item | Nature | Group | Adjusting | Margin base | Prior year | Current year | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Tip: paste a rectangular range from Excel or Sheets.
Adjusting holds a one-off out of Adjusted EBITDA. It stays in the headline walk, so the bars remain the operating story and the two figures are named separately.
Margin base is the denominator. It is on by default for income lines; untick one to strike the margin on revenue alone.
EBITDA movement +$1.80. The walk reconciles.
EBITDA movement
+$1.80
USD · figures as entered · expenses entered as positive magnitudes
EBITDA rose $1.80 between Prior year and Current year. Favourable movements of $9.50 were partly offset by $7.70 of adverse movements. Revenue is the largest single driver at $8.00 favourable. The EBITDA margin moved +1.1 percentage points.
- Prior year
- $8.00
- Current year
- $9.80
EBITDA walk
Prior year to Current year, line by line, in the order you entered them.
Prior year
$8.00
Revenue
+$8.00
favourable
COGS
-$6.00
adverse
Payroll
-$1.50
adverse
Marketing
+$1.50
favourable
Other operating costs
-$0.20
adverse
Current year
$9.80
Show as table
| Line | Value | Context |
|---|---|---|
| Prior year | $8.00 | — |
| Revenue | +$8.00 | favourable |
| COGS | -$6.00 | adverse |
| Payroll | -$1.50 | adverse |
| Marketing | +$1.50 | favourable |
| Other operating costs | -$0.20 | adverse |
| Current year | $9.80 | — |
| Line | Value | Context |
|---|---|---|
| Prior year | $8.00 | — |
| Revenue | +$8.00 | favourable |
| COGS | -$6.00 | adverse |
| Payroll | -$1.50 | adverse |
| Marketing | +$1.50 | favourable |
| Other operating costs | -$0.20 | adverse |
| Current year | $9.80 | — |
Each bar is labelled favourable or adverse in words as well as colour. The driver table below is the accessible version of this chart.
Drivers
Ranked by the size of the profit impact, which is the direction that counts as better for that nature. Raw movement is simply current less prior, and both are shown.
| Line item | Group | Raw movement | Profit impact | Reads as |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | — | +$8.00 | +$8.00 | favourable |
| COGS | — | +$6.00 | -$6.00 | adverse |
| Payroll | — | +$1.50 | -$1.50 | adverse |
| Marketing | — | -$1.50 | +$1.50 | favourable |
| Other operating costs | — | +$0.20 | -$0.20 | adverse |
Below EBITDA, excluded
- Depreciation (Below EBITDA): $5.00 to $5.40, a movement of +$0.40
These lines are in neither EBITDA figure, in no bar and in no margin. They are listed because a pasted profit and loss carries them and silently dropping them would be worse than showing them.
Reuse the analysis
Copy the summary, or export the lines and the chart.
Explain revenue and product cost inside this EBITDA bridge
Connect one income line and one product-cost line to their product explanation. Its price, cost, volume and mix effects replace those two movements once. The main bridge stays available above. This review stays on this page and is not included in account saves.
That button replaces the calculator lines with revenue 3000 → 3080, product cost 1600 → 1660 and overhead 300 → 320 in USD. Then load the synthetic product support file below. For your data, keep your own parent lines.
Required product columns and method
Item, QuantityUnit, Currency, BaseQuantity, BaseRevenue, BaseCost, CurrentQuantity, CurrentRevenue, CurrentCost, RowRole
Use full currency amounts regardless of the main input scale. One comparable quantity unit; explicit product costs; declare detail/subtotal rows. Existing gross-profit PVM is recalculated from the file. Current-quantity price/cost effects already contain their interactions. The file must cover exactly the selected income and cost lines, with the same entity, periods and scenarios.
Transparent by design
How this calculation works
EBITDA here is computed from the lines you entered and from nothing else. If it differs from the figure you publish, the difference is shown rather than reconciled away. If the chart is new to you: how to read an EBITDA bridge.
The built-in example, worked through
Every figure below is produced by the same function the tool runs, from the rows Load example puts in the table. Tick them off against your own arithmetic.
- Prior EBITDA
- $8.00
- Current EBITDA
- $9.80
- Movement
- +$1.80
- Favourable movements
- $9.50
- Adverse movements
- $7.70
- Margins
- 8.0% → 9.1%
- Margin movement
- +1.1 percentage points
- Depreciation, excluded
- $5.00 to $5.40
EBITDA
EBITDA = Σ income − Σ expense
Only the lines you tagged, in each period. This is not IFRS or US GAAP EBITDA unless your tags happen to match that definition, which is exactly why the tie-out field exists.
Sign convention
expenses, D&A, interest and tax are positive magnitudes
Nature decides the sign, not the amount. A signed profit and loss pasted straight in will inflate EBITDA, so negative cost lines are flagged and repaired only when you click.
Profit impact
income: current − prior · expense: prior − current
Positive always means EBITDA is better off, so a cost that fell reads favourable. It does not tell you why the line moved — for that, split it by price, volume and mix.
Raw movement
current − prior, every line
Never re-signed. A cost that rose shows a positive raw movement and a negative profit impact, and both are on the page because they answer different questions.
Below EBITDA
profit impact = 0
D&A, interest, tax and the catch-all are excluded from both endpoints, from every bar and from the margin, and still listed. Tagging them individually is what builds the EBIT / EBT / NI stack; the catch-all feeds none of it.
Margin
EBITDA ÷ margin base · movement = m꜀ − mₚ, in points
The base is the income lines you ticked, so the tile names what it actually divides by. There is no margin where the base is zero or negative — a rate against a denominator the wrong way up means nothing.
Walk order
chart: input order · table: |profit impact| order
The chart is a waterfall in statement order and follows your rows. The ranking lives in the driver table below it, so neither view has to be two things at once.
Grouping
group impact = Σ impacts of its included lines
Filling the Group column bars the chart by division or cost type, in the order the groups first appear. The bars still sum to the same movement and the driver table still lists every line.
Adjusting items
Adjusted EBITDA = EBITDA − Σ impact of flagged lines
Headline EBITDA ignores the flag: the bars are the operating walk and every line you entered is in it. Adjusted EBITDA is the second, separately named figure — there are never two silent definitions.
Tie-out
unexplained = reported − calculated
A published EBITDA is compared against the lines. Any difference is stated, appears in no bar and changes no driver — it is never allocated across the walk to make it close.
Scale
amount = figure entered x scale
Choosing thousands or millions multiplies every figure you type, so a pack written in millions is entered as it reads. Changing the scale afterwards rewrites the boxes rather than the amounts, so no answer moves behind you. Exports carry the full amounts and name the scale that produced them.