Olivier Van Steenlandt covers a common case:
Many companies don’t follow the regular Calendar as we know (January 1st – December 31st). They follow their own Financial Calendar (often called Fiscal Calendar) which can start at any time of the year.
Because of this, writing Year-To-Date calculations in DAX for your Tabular Model might seem challenging.
In the step-by-step example, we are working for a company that starts its Financial Year on July 1st.
Read on to see one way to do it. It doesn’t quite solve the problem Olivier brought up, but I’d also make note that having a calendar table with fiscal + calendar year information in it helps remarkably well. It can even handle multiple fiscal year concepts; as an example, a state agency I worked for had a fiscal year on July 1 but the US federal government’s fiscal year begins October 1, so it was just a matter of having StateFiscalYear and FederalFiscalYear columns.
Also, check out Olivier’s new theming, under the Data Cuisine motif.
You are absolutely right! Thanks for pointing out.