epic: enable the creation of IBCS tables

[machow]

The International Business Communication Standards (IBCS) Association has a number of templates for reporting business financials. A user on discord asked whether we can produce these.

I suspect we're fairly close, but would need to complete a few pieces, like:

• Summaries: a way to include summaries (related to epic: Implement summary_rows() #172. But we could also allow people to bring their own summaries (either via styles, or some summary frame API, where people bring their own aggregations).
• Plot: Waterfall sparkplot (seems very doable; but we should just roll this into its own library as a POC)
• Group labels: what part of the table structure is "Gross Profit" (a label for the summary row?).
  • This means that rows are grouped, the but the group name is not shown
  • Could be that when adding a summary, user can indicate "put the group name in the summary row"
• Vertical gutters between columns (could be made by styling vertical borders wider and transparent)
• Bottom borders: Thicker lines for the 2014, 2015 columns on the bottom (is this table_border_bottom in tab_styles()?)

[lucazanna]

Hi @machow

I am the user who asked the question on Discord.

If I may add to the list above one last thing: IBCS has a specific design for showing change year over year. It’s in the last column of the T04 template table from the IBCS (example below)

I work on data for corporate finance teams, and I start to see more and more interest in this type of tables. And at the same time a lack of tools to build them. (There are proprietary tools but nothing as flexible as great tables)

If it’s possible to achieve these type of tables with great tables, it will be easy to convince the team to adopt great tables for all types of financial reporting.

if any questions or testing needed for this, I’d be happy to support it