The business
A specialty retailer. Store count and selling square footage move separately, because new stores open smaller than the ones that close. Comparable sales break down into transactions, ticket, units and price, and a growing digital business carries a lower merchandise margin than the stores do.
Two workbooks, easy and hard, built from one model. Four years of history, four years to forecast, and a balance sheet that has to close.
Inside each workbook
- Instructions
- What you're building, the rules, how it is marked, terms of use, disclaimer.
- Test
- The sheet you work on. Shaded cells are yours, blue cells are given and locked.
- Solution
- The finished model with live formulas.
- Scoring
- Cell-by-cell result plus an overall percentage.
A toggle at the top of the Test tab stays on N while you build, so you are working blind. Flip it to Y and every cell you filled turns green or red in place — no separate answer key. Values are compared, not formulas, so any construction that lands on the right number scores. The in-sheet coloring needs Excel 2010 or later; the Scoring tab works in any version.