5 Excel Tips to Beef Up Your Corporate Financial Dashboards

Finance professionals use dashboards to give a visual overview of key performance indicators and company trends. This can include data in the form of graphs, tables, and diagrams. It may sound simple, but the corporate financial dashboard is a powerful tool. Dashboards pack a big punch by distilling complex financial analysis into an easily understood message that fits on a single page.

The visual nature of a financial dashboard makes it a perfect tool for storytelling—much more so than raw data. This helps ensure everyone in your company is up to speed and engaged when it comes to the organization’s financial standing.

How to Optimize Your Financial Dashboard in Excel

So what does a good dashboard look like? Here are some simple rules to follow if you want to build an effective financial dashboard in Excel.

1. It’s All About the Data

Raw data represents the key ingredient to an informative financial dashboard. Without clean, accurate data, your dashboard will be unreliable and riddled with errors. So before you even begin thinking about your dashboard design and layout, you must have your data ready and organized. Data with errors means dashboards with errors.

Here are some examples of ways to keep your data clean:

• Make sure to sort your data before charting it.
• Check your formulas for any errors or issues.
• Review your number formatting (decimals vs. percentages vs. currency)

Another way to keep your data clean is to create a method for sharing a document that can be updated in real time and accessed by key members of your team. Doing this will help prevent multiple versions of the same document from being created as well as disparate information and feedback.

2. Make It Simple

As a finance professional, you’re responsible for understanding all the ins and outs of your company’s financials. You may revel in the subtleties of financial modeling. But when you’re designing your dashboard, remember to keep your audience in mind.

Your financial dashboard will likely be seen not only by your finance team but also by executive leadership outside the office of the CFO. And they’re not looking to pick up a degree in accounting or finance anytime soon.

Here are some ways to keep it simple:

• Make sure your headers and access titles are clear and easy to understand.
• Create a high-level dashboard with essential KPIs for the C-suite.
• Keep the important takeaways clear and concise for end users.

Managers and decision makers just need the CliffsNotes version of the company’s financial data. Everyone from C-suite leadership to sales and marketing should be able to take one look at your dashboard and immediately understand the key takeaways.

So if you want to get your message across, you’ll need to carefully design the structure of your dashboard to keep it simple and concise.

3. Make It Pretty

The easiest way to create a simple dashboard is to focus on an effective design. Hide any unnecessary data and calculations that detract from your data visualization.

You can do this by designing the structure of your dashboard around four categories:

1. Data sources: These sheets will contain raw data.
2. Reference tables: These sheets will hold the conversion rules between raw data and calculated columns.
3. PivotTables: These sheets will help you analyze and summarize your data.
4. The dashboard: This should be a single sheet that you use solely for data visualization and wowing your colleagues.

Keep these categories separate. This way, your dashboard sheet can stand on its own without being bogged down by the visual clutter of calculations and raw data. If something is not absolutely crucial for showing the bigger picture, leave it out of your dashboard sheet.

There’s much more you can do in Excel to make your dashboard impressive, but a central focus on design and aesthetics will take you a long way. Make your dashboard visually appealing, and the non-finance people in your company might even start to enjoy getting updated financial reports.

4. Make It Dynamic

It’s one thing to build a dashboard that looks pretty, but how does it drive? The last thing you want is a dashboard with beautiful graphics that only you can navigate because it’s so finicky.

Make your dashboard dynamic so that others can play with it and dive into your data. Key statistics and calculations should be easy to locate from the dashboard sheet. And make sure your overall design can handle a bit of interaction and activity.

5. Make Updating Easy

For your dashboard to be useful, you need to keep it up to date. But nobody wants to spend hours each week updating their dashboard with the latest data.

The process of updating your financial dashboard should be as automated as possible. With reporting solutions from insightsoftware, you can pull real-time data directly from your ERP into Excel. Once your reports are created, simply click a button to refresh at any time, giving you to-the-minute information at any time. This frees your team up from managing manual data dumps and re-keying so they can focus on using the information in the dashboard to drive the business instead.

What to Include

So what should you actually include in your financial dashboard? It depends on the story you’re trying to tell and what metrics are most important for your business and industry. But a good place to start is with some standard KPIs.

For example, an overview graph of your company’s current working capital, including assets and liabilities, can show whether your company is financially healthy at the moment. Other important KPIs to consider include trends in the invoicing and paying processes and the cash conversion cycle.

Conclusion

Dashboards bring the power of visual storytelling to the nitty-gritty numbers of financial analysis. For the most effective financial dashboard in Excel, you’ll want to focus on creating a simple and stylish design that’s dynamic and mostly automated.

But maybe you don’t have time to become an Excel expert. Learn how you can leverage the spreadsheet know-how you already have to create automated, refreshable reporting dashboards. Request a demo now!