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Financial Dashboard Examples: A Comprehensive Guide

Ritinder Kaur

Alfatech’s finance team struggled to deliver monthly figures and forecasts with data siloed in several systems. Plus, information on out-for-approval invoices and unbooked amounts was falling through the cracks. Bas Verweij, the CFO at Alfatech, knew it was time for action.

They upgraded to an advanced version of their embedded analytics tools. Within three weeks, their finance team was ready to generate basic reports and financial dashboards with the new tool.

If you’re in the same position, you’re in the right place. Let’s take a deep dive into the world of financial dashboards.

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Financial Dashboards Guide

What This Article Covers

What Is a Financial Dashboard?

Financial dashboards are tools that visually represent cost, revenue and cash flow metrics for finance and accounting teams. When time is of the essence, these dashboards offer condensed data views, showing you what matters most at a glance.

All enterprise operations and transactions align with your business’s bottom line, so tracking spending, earnings and performance is critical for success. Dashboards don’t replace reports but do a good job when you need quick insights.

And they’re not difficult to make, with financial management solutions offering pre-built templates and designing wizards. From daily metrics to yearly insights, you can view and share the desired data how you want.

Uncluttered yet comprehensive dashboards add value. When designing financial presentations, keeping the target audience in mind helps you stick to the context.

Here’s a brief look at some sample financial dashboards.

CFOs use liquidity analysis dashboards to monitor company solvency. Source

  • Budget vs. Actual Dashboard: Finance teams can compare the projected budget to the actual spending using this dashboard. It tracks project expenses and surfaces those at risk of exceeding the allocated amount.

A budget vs. actual dashboard helps track project spending. Source

  • Revenue Analysis Dashboard: It helps track revenue and sales metrics trends with a period-over-period breakdown. You can keep the interface clutter-free by interlinking any number of dashboards.

Custom data visualization allows everyone to get personalized views, whether CFOs, CEOs or department managers. Periodic sales updates, or numbers by region, store or salesperson, are relevant to a sales manager but not so much for senior management unless there’s an issue.

Financial modeling involves building a mathematical model of a financial scenario to forecast outcomes, which is excellent for spotting investment opportunities and decision-making.

Making dashboards is the easy part, aggregating data is what’s difficult. It had Alfatech rethinking its big data integration strategy.

So which systems feed into financial dashboards?

Enforcing security and data quality management becomes business-critical when data moves across many platforms. ERP solutions are the glue that brings these platforms together under the umbrella of management information systems, called MIS systems. More on it ahead.

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Primary Benefits

Financial analysis is complex and not everyone’s cup of tea. So dashboards are life savers, especially for executives who don’t have the time to perform sophisticated calculations. Automation speeds up decisions and strategy by letting you delegate routine tasks to software programs.

  • Financial insights enable informed decisions about investments, budgeting and resource allocation.
  • Predictive analytics helps you aim higher by planning for increased revenue or improved profit margins.
  • Analyzing historical production and sales planning data helps anticipate business outcomes.
  • Tracking your progress helps you adjust to market changes.
  • Expense tracking helps reduce costs by identifying features and services you don’t use. Supply chain optimization is one example.
  • It promotes accountability.

Tracking Production Metrics

Manufacturing costs include production, inventory and maintenance overheads and may vary by company. Working closely with production and operations teams can help identify which metrics to include in your financial analysis.

Though not all the following KPIs are financial metrics, they impact financial analysis directly or indirectly. Knowing these terms can help you understand the dashboard types we discuss below.

KPIs

  • Downtime is a crucial manufacturing metric to identify and address issues affecting production efficiency, productivity and maintenance.
  • Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) determines how well your machinery and devices run. Low OEE may indicate issues with machine availability, performance or production quality.
  • With production speeding up, capturing maintenance metrics becomes crucial. There’s a noticeable shift from preventive to predictive maintenance, with a focus on gathering near-real-time data for early issue detection.
  • Inventory metrics are vital regardless of whether a company runs lean manufacturing or uses safety stock to safeguard against disruptions. Inventory turnover metrics can reveal inefficiencies in manufacturing processes.
  • Lead time helps evaluate performance by tracking the time taken for total order processing, production and delivery.
  • Product quality is business-critical as rejected goods can indicate a problem or process failure, reducing efficiency and driving up costs.
  • Throughput indicates how each machine performs, helping to identify opportunities for process improvement.

Analyzing these metrics alongside output can provide a comprehensive picture of performance.

Dashboards

  • Production Management Dashboard: It shows a breakdown of production costs, including labor expenses, with period-over-period analysis. Other metrics include overall equipment effectiveness, availability history, performance and production quality trends.

    Used By: Operations, accounting and production managers and financial analysts.

Tracking production and labor costs keeps expenses in check. Source

  • Daily Production Dashboard: Monitor production by day, by the hour or year-over-year. You can add manufacturing and maintenance costs to calculate the return on assets and asset turnover.

    Used By: Operations and production managers and financial analysts.

  • Comprehensive Costs Dashboard: Finance teams can audit, allocate and predict spending using the costs dashboard. With it, you can show the breakdown of production, labor and inventory overheads if your organization tracks them.

    Used By: Operations, accounting and production managers and financial analysts.

  • Equipment Maintenance Summary Dashboard: It includes the sum of work orders, expenses by equipment type and the average cost per item, among other metrics. Justifying the case for new equipment becomes easy with a cost comparison for a new machine against frequent parts replacement.

    Used By: Maintenance, accounting and production managers and financial analysts.

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Monitoring Procurement Metrics

Finding vendors and negotiating with them to purchase goods and services is procurement. Tracking purchases over time and by category connects your business needs to suppliers and keeps you informed about the efficacy of your business practices.

KPIs

  • Compliance rate metrics include disputed invoices and the total difference between the price paid and the price quoted. A clearly-defined supplier contract with defined penalties can help maintain and improve compliance.
  • Supplier defect rate measures a supplier’s quality by analyzing the number of substandard products against the total number of item units tested.
  • Purchase order (PO) accuracy measures whether suppliers delivered orders on time. Low PO accuracy indicates increased operating costs.
  • Supplier lead time is measured in days and indicates the time between a supplier receiving an order and shipping it.
  • Purchase order cycle time is measured in hours or days and tracks the time between submitting the purchase request and sending it to a vendor. It’s part of the purchase order cycle.
  • Vendor availability measures the readiness of a vendor to respond to emergency demands. It’s the ratio of available items to orders placed.
  • Spend under management refers to the percentage of a company’s procurement expenses that its management team manages. A higher number is good, which means the business can control cost optimization and plan better.
  • Procurement ROI is an internal metric assessing whether your company’s procurement investment is cost-effective and profitable.

Dashboards

A procurement dashboard changes considerably from the requirements phase to product acquisition, sourcing information from accounting and ERP systems.

  • Procurement KPI Dashboard: It’s a visual display of procurement KPIs, including cost savings, spend under management, inventory turnover and supplier performance.

    Used By: Procurement managers, accounting and finance teams and senior management.

  • Procurement Spend Analysis Dashboard: Spend analysis aims to reduce costs and increase efficiencies by improving supplier relationships. Measuring savings, lowering costs, total spend, maverick spends and purchase price variance are KPIs to track on this dashboard.

    Used By: Supply chain, procurement, accounting and finance managers.

Spend analytics helps track savings and reduce supplier risk. Source

  • Purchase Order Dashboard: You can identify bottlenecks in the procurement process by viewing the number of purchase orders created, approved and fulfilled on this dashboard.

    Used By: Accounts payable, supply chain and procurement managers.

The tiles at the top show purchase order details at a glance. Source

  • Vendor Analysis Dashboard: It includes insights into supplier performance, including delivery times, quality and cost. These visual metrics help flag areas for cost savings and improved negotiations with suppliers.

    Used By: Supply chain managers.

Supplier selection becomes easy with vendor analysis dashboards. Source

  • Contract Management Dashboard: It’s an at-a-glance view of supplier contracts obligations, terms, pricing and renewal dates. Contract tracking helps in future cost calculations.

    Used By: Finance and legal teams.

Procurement dashboards help track supplier contract compliance. Source

Data quality and organizational culture are two significant blockers to building effective financial dashboards. Learn how to resolve them with our article on the best dashboard practices.

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FAQs

1. Why do I need to know about liquidity ratio analysis?

As a financial analyst, you might need to perform a liquidity ratio analysis of another company for your employer to determine whether it’s a good investment opportunity. Measuring liquidity, or solvency, is an excellent way to assess a company’s ability to address its short-term liabilities using its current assets.

Investors, creditors and financial analysts consider companies with high liquidity ratios as financially stable and less risky, while a low liquidity ratio is a red flag. It means the company may not have enough cash or assets to convert quickly into cash to meet its financial obligations.

There are many methods to measure liquidity.

  1. Current Ratio: It reflects a company’s ability to pay off its current liabilities with its existing assets. You can calculate it by dividing a company’s assets by its liabilities.

    Current Liquidity Ratio = Current Assets / Current Liabilities

  2. Quick Ratio (Acid-Test Ratio): It’s a measure of a company’s ability to pay off its current liabilities with its most liquid assets (such as cash and accounts receivable) that it can quickly convert into cash. You can derive the quick ratio by subtracting inventory from current assets and dividing the result by current liabilities.

    Quick Liquidity Ratio = (Current Assets – Inventory) / Current Liabilities

  3. Cash Ratio: It depicts a company’s ability to pay off its current liabilities using only its cash and cash equivalents. The calculation involves dividing them by their current liabilities.

    Cash Liquidity Ratio = (Cash and Cash Equivalents) / Current Liabilities

2. What are cost centers?

In business, a cost center is a department or function that incurs costs but doesn’t generate revenue directly. When you know where the money is going, you can plan to save it by identifying improvement areas.

Cost centers are business-supporting operations like finance, human resources, IT (information technology) and facilities management. A cost center tracks and maps spending associated with these functions to revenue-generating areas of the organization.

3. Why do financial analysts need to know about MIS?

Management Information Systems (MIS) are the hardware, software, people and processes that support business intelligence, operations and IT. They build the foundation of enterprise data management, moving and managing information, while ERP systems integrate the various systems.

As a financial analyst, you must integrate information from various operational sources, so knowledge about MIS systems is an asset. Additionally, these systems feed data to FP&A (financial planning and analysis) systems.

4. Are financial dashboards part of FP&A?

Yes.

Financial planning and analysis activities include budgeting, forecasting and business analysis to determine whether the company’s current investments are the best use of its money. An FP&A team reports to the CFO (chief financial officer), though the CFO might perform both roles in smaller setups.

FP&A analysts assess the company’s financial health using data from departmental reports and dashboards like the above mentioned ones. Calculations include determining the most profitable products and those with the highest profit margins.

Tasks like assessing the cost efficiency of departments and preparing budgets and internal reports for the executive leadership are part of this role. Many MIS reports feed FP&A insights.

5. Is my business ready for enterprise-level financial analytics?

Ask yourself these questions.

  • Is reconciling month-end financials becoming more complex?
  • Are your revenue and expense forecasts based on guesswork rather than hardcore data?
  • Are MIS integrations messy and confusing? Does incorporating spreadsheet data slow you down?
  • Is information access difficult? How long would determining the profit margins by product category and region take?
  • Does accounting take longer due to paper-based invoices and sales orders?
  • Do sales and customer service need a boost?
  • Does your industry have strict regulatory requirements? If yes, your organization is a prime candidate for a financial analytics solution.
  • Is expansion on the cards? You may need advanced analytics if your business is growing rapidly or entering new markets.

Performing a cost-benefit analysis can help. Compare software acquisition and maintenance costs against the potential benefits of improved financial reporting and analysis to decide if it’s for you.

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Next Steps

Often, legacy systems hold companies back from seeking new software. Sometimes the solution is less drastic and might require acquiring new features rather than investing in a new platform, as in Alfatech’s case.

What are you waiting for? Get started on software search with our ready-to-go, customizable requirements template.

Which dashboard software do you use for financial analysis? Is there a particular product that stood out? Let us know in the comments.

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