Financial dashboard: from figures to steering

A financial dashboard is one self-refreshing screen holding the five to ten financial kpis you steer on: revenue against budget, gross margin, cash flow, working capital and outstanding invoices, straight out of your accounting or ERP system. Not an overview someone assembles by hand halfway through the month, but figures that are already there when you open your laptop. Technically that’s a step forward. Whether it’s a step forward in how you steer depends on something else entirely.

For that, watch how your monthly numbers meeting starts. Finance brings an overview from the accounts, sales has its own list out of the CRM, and there’s a spreadsheet carrying a correction agreed last year that nobody can explain anymore. The first quarter of an hour goes on working out which revenue figure is the real one. Sound familiar? What’s missing there isn’t a chart, it’s an agreement.

Which is exactly why a financial dashboard has such a short shelf life when you start at the design end. The figures on screen are never more reliable than the definitions underneath them, and a definition like that isn’t a design choice, it’s a board decision. That is also the step data-driven working stands or falls on, whichever screen ends up on top of it. Both are covered below: which figures belong on the screen, and what you settle before anyone draws the first chart.

What is a financial dashboard?

A financial dashboard is a dashboard showing your organization’s financial position, based on data from your financial administration and your operational systems. For one organization that administration sits in a standalone accounting package, for another it’s a module inside the ERP. The dashboard doesn’t care: it pulls the figures in itself, turns them into kpis, and puts each one next to a target. Revenue next to budget, margin next to last year, cash flow next to the forecast. Some organizations call it a finance dashboard rather than a financial one, and mean the same screen by it.

The difference with the monthly report you get today isn’t in the charts. It’s in who does the work. A monthly report gets made, a dashboard is simply there. That changes the question you ask alongside it, from “are these figures right” to “what do we do about this figure”.

For most mid-sized organizations, that dashboard is one overview page for the board plus one or two detail pages for finance. More pages rarely produce more insight. In practice that overview page is often the financial half of a wider management dashboard, where utilization, lead time and staff turnover sit next to the financial figures.

Which kpis belong on a financial dashboard?

Six blocks answer the “are we in good shape” question for almost any organization:

• Revenue against budget. Not just the amount, but the gap with what you planned, per month and cumulative.
• Gross margin per product, client or location. Revenue without margin tells you nothing about whether growth is actually earning you anything.
• Cash flow and liquidity. What comes in and goes out, plus a thirty to ninety day look ahead.
• Working capital. Receivables, payables and stock, with the average payment term alongside.
• Cost structure. Fixed against variable costs, as a percentage of revenue.
• Financial ratios. Solvency, current ratio and the ratio of debt to EBITDA. Not figures you steer on weekly, but very much the figures you get judged on.

Outstanding receivables deserve a tile of their own inside that, because it turns credit control into a kpi rather than a task that gets squeezed in between other work. The Dutch government’s step-by-step plan for an unpaid invoice sets out how quickly late payment eats into the cash you have to work with, and that’s exactly the kind of figure a quarterly report reaches you too late to act on. To check whether your set is complete, its guidance on business cash flow walks through the same ground.

If you have financing in place, there’s a second reason to put those ratios on the screen. Your loan agreement contains covenants: commitments on your solvency, say, or your debt against EBITDA, tested on a fixed date. Spot a month in advance that you’re about to slip below one and you have a conversation with your bank. Spot it at the annual accounts and you get a letter from your bank.

Five to ten kpis is enough for most boards. Every figure you add costs attention from the figures already on there. A screen with forty tiles isn’t a dashboard anymore, it’s an annual report in colour.

What does a financial dashboard look like?

More concrete than a list of metrics: here is how that screen looks at a wholesaler running a single set of books.

The overview page shows four things side by side. Revenue against budget, gross margin as a percentage, the liquidity forecast for the coming sixty days, and the amount outstanding with customers, average payment term alongside. Each figure carries its target and the gap underneath it. Anything more and the page starts shouting.

The detail page below it is for finance and holds the statements you know from your accounts: the profit and loss against budget by account group, the balance sheet with working capital pulled out separately, and a rolling forecast that moves on a month at a time. That’s the page somebody clicks into the moment the board sees a gap on the overview, and it’s where financial analysis actually happens rather than gets read.

What differs per organization isn’t that structure, it’s the kpis on it. At a professional services firm, billable hours, realized hourly rate and project profitability sit on the overview page and stock is irrelevant. At a wholesaler it’s exactly the other way round. Financial dashboards end up looking much alike in shape, and almost never in content.

How do you read a financial dashboard?

Not by working through it left to right. A dashboard you read in full has turned back into a report with colour in it. You look at what’s off target and leave the rest alone.

That works with three questions, in this order. Which figure sits outside its target? Since when, and is the movement continuing? And does a decision hang on it that has to be made this week? If every figure is within target you’re done in two minutes. That isn’t a wasted meeting, that’s the whole point.

The trap is the figure that looks good. Revenue above budget with margin below last year isn’t a strong quarter, it’s selling at a higher cost. Insight rarely comes off a single tile, it comes off two tiles saying different things. Which is why revenue and margin sit next to each other rather than on two separate pages.

Why a monthly report is not the same as steering

A monthly report is a look backwards by definition. It only arrives once the month is closed, and by the time it gets discussed you’re two to three weeks into the next one. A margin that slipped in the first week only becomes visible after six weeks of carrying on the old way.

Steering information works the other way round: you see the figure while you can still do something about it. That isn’t a matter of reporting faster, it’s a matter of not reporting at all. The figures arrive as soon as the accounts have them, and the question in the meeting room shifts to what you do about the gap.

None of which means the month-end close disappears. You need it for your annual accounts, your accountant and your bank. It just isn’t the moment you adjust course, and in a lot of organizations that’s quietly what it has become.

Settle what every figure means before you build

Ask three people in your organization what “revenue” is and you’ll get three answers. Invoiced or delivered? By order date or invoice date? Intercompany lines included or not? As long as none of that is written down, everyone builds their own version, and those versions meet each other in the meeting room.

So for every kpi on the dashboard, pin down four things: which system the figure comes from, exactly how it’s calculated, who is allowed to change the definition, and how often it refreshes. That’s an afternoon at the table with finance, and it’s the least exciting part of the whole project. It’s also the only part that decides whether the dashboard is still being used a year from now.

A practical test at handover: if the revenue figure on the dashboard doesn’t reconcile to your general ledger down to the euro, the dashboard isn’t finished. With financial figures, nearly right is the same as wrong. One difference nobody can explain on the spot, and the next meeting is back to discussing the figures instead of the decision.

Which systems do you connect?

The base is whichever system holds your financial administration. For one organization that’s a standalone accounting package such as Exact Online, Twinfield, AccountView or King, for another the bookkeeping is a module inside the ERP, think AFAS, Microsoft Dynamics or SAP. Ready-made connectors exist for most of those systems, and whatever isn’t on the list almost always offers an API or a scheduled export. What such a connection looks like from the inside is set out step by step in our article on connecting AFAS to Power BI.

In practice your bank joins that for the current balance, your payroll system for staff costs, your CRM for the pipeline alongside realized revenue, and sometimes your time tracking or stock system. If all of that already sits in the same ERP, that saves you a connection. It doesn’t save you the agreement on what each figure means, because you have that same discussion inside a single system.

If you have several entities under a holding company, one step gets added. Each subsidiary runs its own books, and the board wants a single consolidated picture with the option to click through per entity. That isn’t an extra chart, it’s a decision in the data model: which chart of accounts leads, how intercompany entries get eliminated, and whether foreign currency converts at the daily or the monthly rate. Skip those three questions and you get a total that reconciles to none of the subsidiaries.

Every extra source makes the data model underneath heavier, not the dashboard on top of it. Microsoft’s documentation on data sources in Power BI sets out which connection types exist; which one makes sense depends on how often your figures need to refresh and how large the dataset is. Start with the accounts, and only add a second source once the first one is right.

When to wait a little before building

The question is rarely whether a financial dashboard pays off, it’s whether this is the right moment to start. In three situations you fix something else first:

• Your bookkeeping is behind. A dashboard only makes that backlog visible faster, it doesn’t fix it. Catch up first, build after.
• You’re midway through a system change. If you’re moving to a different ERP or accounting package within six months, you build every connection twice. Wait until the new source is in place.
• No decision depends on it yet. If nobody can name what changes when a figure moves, start with that question. Otherwise you end up with a screen that gets opened on Monday morning and closed again.

If you recognize one of those three, that’s the conversation to have upfront, not after handover.

From dashboard to a fixed steering moment

A financial dashboard only changes something once there’s a moment attached to it. For most organizations a twenty minute meeting each week does the job: the kpis sitting outside their target, one owner per kpi, and one agreement with a date behind it per gap. The rest of the dashboard is there for whoever wants to click through.

So put a target next to every figure. Revenue of €412,000 tells you nothing. That same €412,000 against a budget of €450,000 is a conversation. Without a target, a dashboard stays a reference work.

How a project like that runs in stages, from analysis to foundation to your own team taking it over, is set out in our four-step approach. Want to know what the build costs and how long it takes? The ranges are in our article on getting a Power BI dashboard built.

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Will you glance at your dashboard once a month, or use it to adjust something every week? Want to know which five kpis belong on that screen for your organization? Get in touch, and we’ll walk through them on your own figures.

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