Basic previous year measure

I've had similar problems this week, but I was defining Fiscal years and making a date input in a calculate formula relative to todays date. I came accross this blog that might help:

https://www.fourmoo.com/2016/09/07/create-dynamic-periods-for-fiscal-or-calendar-dates-in-power-bi/

However for me I wanted a simplier solution than discussed in the blog, this is how I have resloved the problem.

Firstly you need a to create a power BI calender and relate it to the date column in your sales table; there are lots of blogs on that if you don't already have.

Then I've created  (measures) for relative variable year start and end e.g.

This year

Var TY Start = Date(Year(Today()),01,31)

Var TY End = Date(Year(Today()),12,31)

Last Year

Var LY Start = Date(Year(Today())-1,01,31)

Var LY End = Date(Year(Today())-1,12,31)

Then I used the variables in the Calculate Measure:

LY Sales = Calculate(sum([sales]),

                                 Datesbetween(Dates[Calender],

                                 [Var LY Start], [Var LY End]

                                 ) 

So to go 2 years back I created more variables for start and end and -2 of the year etc. This is working for me. I know there are probably alot cleaner and smarter ways of doing this, but this was a quick fix for me to create a variable relative to todays date.

Terry