Calender year vs. Fiscal year

[Therese]

I have a very basic question. I want to extract variables based on a date. Specifically I want to create a variable "Quarters" from a date. I am using SPSS, so I can do that with the XDate.Quarter function. However, I want the quarters to be based on a fiscal year rather than a calender year. Is that possible? Specifically, I want the first quarter to be July - Sep of the previous year and quarter four to be Apr - June of the current year and so on. I can cheat right now because I only have one fiscal year in the file, but I was wondering if it is possible to make this translation so that if I want to compare for future fiscal years, etc...

Thanks for any help

Therese

 

[SerrenaC]

I'm not familiar with SPSS. But I often need to treat data the sameway. If you use excel you can create a calendar, and then, use the Vlookup command to assign the quarter based on the calendar date. If this would be useful to you let me know and I can send you the calendar I've created (which is based on the fiscal year you've described).

SerrenaC