Analyzing Booking Windows in Tableau

A teammate asked how close to showtime customers book tickets, how that differs by ticket type, and how many bookings and gross sales occur 0–30 and 31–60 minutes before showtime. They also wanted this available by event date.

Here’s how I approached it in Tableau.

Step 1: Calculate Total Minutes Before Showtime

First, I calculated the difference in minutes between the transaction date and the event (item) date:

Last Sale (minutes):
DATEDIFF('minute', MAX([Transaction Date]), MAX([Item Date]))

Using MAX() ensures the calculation evaluates correctly at the event level in Tableau.

Step 2: Convert Minutes to dd-hh-mm Format

To display the time difference as days, hours, and minutes, I used modulo (%) to isolate the remainder after removing larger time units.

• 1440 minutes = 1 day
• 60 minutes = 1 hour

Days

INT([Last Sale (minutes)] / 1440)

Hours

INT(([Last Sale (minutes)] % 1440) / 60)

Minutes

[Last Sale (minutes)] % 60

Modulo works here by stripping out completed time units and returning only the remainder. This allows us to progressively isolate days, then hours, then minutes.

This calculation converts total minutes into a formatted string while correctly handling negative values (sales occurring after event time).

Last Sale (dd-hh-mm):
IF [Last Sale (minutes)] < 0 THEN
    "-" +
    STR(INT(ABS([Last Sale (minutes)]) / 1440)) + "d " +
    STR(INT((ABS([Last Sale (minutes)]) % 1440) / 60)) + "h " +
    STR(ABS([Last Sale (minutes)]) % 60) + "m"
ELSE
    STR(INT([Last Sale (minutes)] / 1440)) + "d " +
    STR(INT(([Last Sale (minutes)] % 1440) / 60)) + "h " +
    STR([Last Sale (minutes)] % 60) + "m"
END

Step 3: Same-Day Booking Window (0–60 Minutes)

To analyze bookings within the final hour before showtime, I created:

IF DATEDIFF('day', [Transaction Date], [Item Date]) = 0
AND DATEDIFF('minute', [Transaction Date], [Item Date]) >= 0
THEN DATEDIFF('minute', [Transaction Date], [Item Date])
END

From there, I bucketed into:

IF [Minutes Before Show] <= 30 THEN "0–30"
ELSEIF [Minutes Before Show] <= 60 THEN "31–60"
END

This allowed aggregation of bookings and gross sales by final-minute booking windows.