Today’s guide explains everything you need to know about the financial dashboard template – or P&L report, as it’s also known. We’ll show you what it is, why it’s important to deliver an overview of the company’s liquidity.
Our goal is to focus on data visualization, not data entry. We’ve just created modern charts to visualize the most important financial metrics and trends.
Before we dive in, if you want to learn more about dashboards, you should check out our training video!
Navigation structure and Ribbon control
The structure is clean. If you are using a grid layout, you’ll provide the best user experience.
We’ve used advanced chart types and a grid layout in Excel for better readability. The dashboard and the main sheets can be controlled from the ribbon using icons.
When you develop and create complex reports and templates with multiple worksheets, you have to keep your eyes on the navigation structure.
We’ll use three Worksheet: data, calculation, and dashboard – this is the industry standard if you are in dashboard design.
Financial Dashboard: Metrics
First and foremost, find out your financial metrics. We’ll track the following KPIs:
- Income
- Net Profit
- Net Profit Margin %
- Expenses
- Cash at EOM
- Quick Ratio ((Current assets – Inventories) / Current liabilities)
- Current Ratio (Current assets / Current liabilities)
- Accounts Receivable
- Accounts Payable
- % of Income Budget
- % of Expenses Budget
- Net Profit versus Target
Core logic, in a nutshell
As first, you can add your data to the “data” Worksheet.
In this financial dashboard example, we’ve created three sections for the key performance indicators. Just place your monthly results.
As you see, we’ve applied simple calculations. Use nested IF function (combined with IFERROR function) to identify and show the results of the selected month.
Let us see the calculation sheet. As we know, conditional formatting playing a key role when you want to show the target vs. actual performance. We’ll use standard color codes for the positive and negative variance.
Tip: Be careful with the conditional formatting rules! Some metrics (for example, Expenses, Accounts Payable, etc.) work unusual. If the Expenses increased vs. the last month, you have to use a red color because it’s a negative trend.
Dynamic charts
We love dynamic charts!
If you want to visualize the monthly / yearly performance we recommend using these chart types below:
Download the template and play with our modern dashboards.