MIP Logo

Dashboard Day 5 | Iowa Liquor Sales | Estimating Tax Revenue

This post was originally published on The Data School blog between 2018 and July 2025, before our program was renamed to MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. References throughout this article to “The Data School” or “DS” all refer to what is now MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. The program, its people, and its commitment to launching outstanding analytics careers remain the same – just under a new name.

If you are having trouble viewing this article, please report it here. 

Last day of dashboard week. It has been fun. Long hours but I enjoyed the process very much.

The Challenge

For this challenge, we were given a dataset of liquor sales for the state of Iowa in the US. Since Iowa is an alcohol controlled state, the state purchases alcohol directly from the distillers ( local and abroad) than wholesale to retailers. The ‘profit’ that the state generate is the liquor tax. On top of the liquor tax, retailers must collect a 6% sales tax from consumers.

Therefore, I have set out to calculate the total estimated tax revenue from sales of liquor including sales tax.

The Dashboard

You can access the dashboard here:

Next steps:

My next step would be calculating more tax. I know for a fact that the federal government taxes the distiller/ imported, therefore I could calculate the tax revenue collected by the federal government based on Iowa’s liquor sales.

Share this post