How to Calculate Month-over-Month Growth in Google Sheets

This month against last month, in dollars and percent. Three short formulas once the monthly totals are in place.

The short answer: with monthly revenue in column B, growth is =B3/B2-1 formatted as a percent. In the sample data, September 2026 was $138,635 and October $142,475, growth of 2.8%.

The sample data

Sample data: a tab named Orders with 8,120 order lines from January 2025 to October 2026, one row per order line. Revenue is Qty × Unit price; Cost is the line's cost of goods (Qty × unit cost). Download orders.csv and import it (File → Import) to follow along. The business is fictional.

The classic way: monthly totals, then change and percent

Headings in row 1: Month, Revenue, Change, Growth. Months in column A: =DATE(2026,4,1) in A2 and =EDATE(A2,1) copied down to A8, formatted "MMM yyyy". Revenue in B2, copied down:

=SUMIFS(Orders!$J:$J, Orders!$A:$A, ">="&$A2, Orders!$A:$A, "<"&EDATE($A2,1))

The first month has nothing to compare with, so start the comparison in row 3, then copy down:

=B3-B2
=IFERROR(B3/B2-1, "")

The first is the dollar change (C3), the second is the growth rate (D3); format D as a percent. IFERROR keeps a month with zero sales from showing #DIV/0!.

Computed from the sample CSV above. Cells formatted as currency and percent.

Highlight the drops. Select D3:D8, Format → Conditional formatting, "Less than" 0, red text. The months that shrank jump out.

Gotchas

• Comparing a partial month. Ten days of November against all of October always looks like a collapse. Compare full months, or month-to-date against the same days of last month: =SUMIFS(Orders!J:J, Orders!A:A, ">="&EOMONTH(TODAY(),-1)+1, Orders!A:A, "<="&TODAY()) vs the same window a month back using EDATE(...,-1).
• Seasonality. A summer dip followed by a September jump is the calendar, not the business. Year-over-year growth takes the season out.
• Averaging percents. The average of six monthly growth rates is not the growth over six months. For that, compare the last month with the first: =B8/B2-1.
• Months with different lengths. February has fewer selling days. If that matters, compare revenue per day: divide each total by =DAY(EOMONTH(A2,0)).

The one-cell way: =QUIRIZ

With the Quiriz add-on for Google Sheets, you type the question instead of building the formula. =QUIRIZ does not read the cells around it: it answers from the datasets in your Quiriz account. For this example, upload orders.csv as a dataset, or connect your Shopify store. You can also add a Google Sheet itself as a dataset that refreshes on a schedule. Then, in any empty cell:

=QUIRIZ("monthly revenue from April to October 2026 with the dollar change and percent growth vs the prior month", "table")

The "table" mode spills the answer down and to the right from that cell, header row first:

Same figures as the formula result above, from the same sample data. The spilled cells are plain numbers, so you can format them, total them or chart them; here they are formatted as currency and percent. Column headings are written with each answer and may be worded differently.

The other modes: "verbose" (the default) answers in a sentence, "bullets" writes two to four points one per cell, and "notes" adds how the figure was calculated. Install Quiriz for Google Sheets and try the question on your own data.

Related questions

• Monthly sales report
• Year-over-year comparison
• Average order value by month
• Sales by region and channel
• How to use SUMIF and COUNTIF in Google Sheets
• How to use conditional formatting in Google Sheets
• How to write a monthly business report
• All Google Sheets questions

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