Waterfall charts in style of The Economist with R

Waterfall charts are sometimes quite helpful to illustrate the various moving parts in financial data, in particular when I have positive and negative values like a profit and loss statement (P&L). However, they can be a bit of a pain to produce in Excel. Not so in R, thanks to the waterfall package by James Howard. In combination with the latticeExtra package it is nearly a one-liner to produce a good looking waterfall chart that mimics the look of The Economist:

Example of a waterfall chart in R
library(latticeExtra)
library(waterfall)
data(rasiel) # Example data of the waterfall package
rasiel
# label value subtotal
# 1 Net Sales 150 EBIT
# 2 Expenses -170 EBIT
# 3 Interest 18 Net Income
# 4 Gains 10 Net Income
# 5 Taxes -2 Net Income

asTheEconomist(
waterfallchart(value ~ label, data=rasiel,
groups=subtotal, main="P&L")
)
Of course you can create a waterfall chart also with ggplot2, the Learning R blog has a post on this topic.