Fictional assignment
Compare four fictional locations for Fern Retail.
The regional manager wants profit, margin, conversion and year-over-year growth. Recommend the location with the highest operating profit, provided growth is nonnegative. A location with no prior-year sales needs a stated fallback rather than a division error.
All records and amounts are fictional practice data. Deliver the completed workbook and a formula-based answer that updates when the inputs change.
Sales totals alone don't show whether a location should expand. Subtract operating cost to find profit, divide by sales to find margin, and compare orders with visits to find conversion. Each measure answers a different question, so don't combine the percentages into an unexplained score.
The manager supplied a specific decision rule: choose the highest-profit store whose sales haven't declined. Calculate growth against the prior year, and return zero when the prior-year value is zero. That fallback is an instruction for this exercise, not a claim that a newly opened store has no growth. Keep the original figures visible beside the ratios so a reader can trace the recommendation.