In today’s dynamic business environment, gaining comprehensive visibility into financial data is crucial for making informed decisions. This is where the significance of a financial dashboard shines through.

In this article, we will explore the concept of a financial dashboard, highlight its numerous benefits, and provide various kinds of financial dashboard examples for you to employ and explore. Furthermore, we will introduce some business intelligence solution that excels in simplifying the process of creating and utilizing a financial dashboard effectively.

What is A Financial Dashboard?

A financial dashboard, one of the most important types of data dashboards, functions as a business intelligence tool that enables finance and accounting teams to visually represent, monitor, and present financial key performance indicators (KPIs). Contemporary dashboards surpass basic visualization and reporting by utilizing financial analytics to amalgamate diverse financial and accounting data, empowering analysts to delve further into the data and uncover valuable insights that can optimize cost efficiency and enhance profitability.

Financial Dashboard Examples

Note: All the financial dashboard examples shown in this article are created by FineReport, a powerful dashboard software that has been honorably mentioned by Gartner Magic Quadrant for ABI Platforms. You can download FineReport for free and have a try!

Try FineReport Now

1. Financial Statements

As part of their final statement, organizations have the obligation to present three fundamental reports pertaining to their cash flows, profit-generating activities, and overall financial standing. These reports include the cash flow statement, income statement, and balance sheet. FineReport simplifies and automates the generation of these financial statements, eliminating the need for manual effort. With FineReport, exporting or printing financial statements in diverse formats, such as Excel, PDF, PNG, and more, is effortlessly achievable. Moreover, the software offers the convenient option of scheduling automated report delivery via email.

2. Financial Performance Dashboard

The financial performance dashboard provides a comprehensive overview of key metrics related to your balance sheet, shedding light on the efficiency of your capital expenditure. Evaluating the impact of your capital can be done through four essential indicators: return on assets, working capital ratio, return on equity, and debt-equity ratio.

Return on assets measures the net profit generated per unit of asset, while return on equity (ROE) signifies the return on shareholders’ equity, indicating the efficiency of the company’s own capital. Generally, higher values indicate greater returns on investment. The working capital ratio, also known as the current ratio, reflects the company’s liquidity by dividing total current assets by total current liabilities. On the other hand, the debt-equity ratio measures the company’s financial leverage, revealing the proportion of equity to debt in the company’s funding for asset creation.

On the right side of the dashboard, the balance sheet serves as the primary financial statement that captures the financial position of an enterprise, encompassing assets, liabilities, and owner’s equity, on a specific date. The balance sheet plays a vital role in internal management, helping companies fine-tune their business strategies and prevent misuse. Simultaneously, it provides readers with a quick understanding of the business’s status.

In summary, the financial performance dashboard and balance sheet enable effective evaluation of capital efficiency and provide valuable insights into a company’s financial standing, guiding decision-making processes.

Financial performance dashboard by FineReport

3. Financial KPI Dashboard

The financial KPI dashboard aggregates vital performance indicators that hold significant importance in business analysis and decision-making. These indicators encompass various aspects such as working capital, current ratio, quick ratio, cash flow ratio, current assets and liabilities, profit margin, liquidity ratio, budgets, and payment errors, among others.

Working capital serves as a metric that evaluates a company’s liquidity, operational efficiency, and short-term financial well-being. The current ratio gauges a company’s capacity to meet short-term obligations within a year, while the quick ratio assesses its ability to fulfill immediate obligations using highly liquid assets. The cash flow ratio showcases the extent to which current liabilities can be covered by cash flows generated from operations, providing insights into short-term liquidity.

Furthermore, the dashboard incorporates the calculation of current assets and current liabilities, examining their corresponding figures. If a company’s current assets fall short of its current liabilities, it may encounter challenges in growth or meeting creditor obligations. The liquidity ratio analysis, presented through a line chart, signifies whether a company’s current assets will adequately meet its impending obligations. By comparing the current ratio, quick ratio, and cash flow ratio, companies can assess their current operational status and determine necessary actions to align with their business strategies.

Budget variance quantifies the discrepancy between budgeted and actual figures, enabling forecasters to make more accurate predictions regarding future costs and revenues. Profit margin, a pivotal indicator of financial health, enables companies to track fluctuations in profitability, assess the effectiveness of current practices, and project future profits based on revenue.

Lastly, the vendor payment error rate measures the diligence of the accounts payable department in issuing and settling vendor invoices, underscoring the importance of accurate and timely payments.

The financial KPI dashboard presents a comprehensive snapshot of key indicators, enabling businesses to make informed decisions, identify areas for improvement, and align their strategies for sustained success.

4. CFO Dashboard

The CFO dashboard goes beyond financial metrics and encompasses non-financial indicators, providing valuable insights for chief financial decision-makers. Financial indicators, such as revenue, gross profit, asset-to-debt ratio, current ratio, turnover, and price-earnings (P/E) ratio, serve as key measures of profitability, solvency, operational capability, and market valuation. These indicators offer an intuitive reflection of the company’s operational status and profitability. If any indicator displays abnormal values, the company can utilize the dashboard to identify the specific situation within the relevant department and implement corresponding strategic adjustments to restore normal operations.

Non-financial indicators primarily focus on client satisfaction and the number of certified employers. These indicators indirectly shed light on the enterprise’s operational conditions. By investigating customer satisfaction levels and monitoring trends, management can gauge the company’s overall performance. Fluctuations in customer satisfaction prompt companies to conduct customer surveys, enabling adjustments in product offerings and business strategies to align with customer needs, thereby ensuring a favorable market share for the company’s products. Additionally, by assessing the number of certified employers, companies can determine the need for training initiatives and allocate expenditures accordingly.

The integration of both financial and non-financial indicators in the CFO dashboard empowers decision-makers to gain comprehensive insights into the company’s overall performance, enabling them to make informed decisions, address issues proactively, and drive sustainable growth.

5. Cash Management Dashboard

The cash management dashboard comprises six sections that present clear data, charts, and tables, providing a comprehensive overview of key financial metrics. It offers a quick and concise snapshot of the quick ratio, cash balance, working capital ratio, days sales outstanding, days inventory outstanding, and days payable outstanding.

To begin, the cash management dashboard evaluates the quick ratio, which serves as an essential indicator of the company’s asset liquidity. It reflects the ability of cash or readily realizable assets to cover current liabilities. It is generally advisable to maintain a quick ratio above 100%.

The dashboard also provides immediate visualization of cash conversion metrics, including days sales outstanding, days inventory outstanding, and days payable outstanding. These sections display concrete numbers such as accounts receivable (AR) turnover and accounts payable (AP) turnover, accompanied by histograms representing the turnover trends. This information allows for a quick assessment of current expenditures and cash position, supporting the formulation or adjustment of cash management strategies as needed.

Additionally, the dashboard includes a line chart illustrating the trends of days of inventory outstanding, aiding in effective inventory management. The cash balance and working capital ratio are prominently displayed on the dashboard, presented as both numerical values and visual charts. This intuitive presentation enables a quick understanding of the company’s cash position at a glance.

With its comprehensive sections and user-friendly interface, the cash management dashboard empowers businesses to effectively monitor and manage their cash flow, optimizing financial decision-making and ensuring financial stability.

6. Dupont Analysis Dashboard

FineReport simplifies the implementation of the Dupont analysis model, enabling an in-depth examination of an enterprise’s financial condition through Return on Investment (ROI). The Dupont analysis model comprises three key components: profit margin, asset turnover, and equity multiplier. With FineReport, conducting a Dupont analysis is straightforward, allowing users to delve into the specifics and explore strategies for enhancing investor returns. Users can easily navigate through the data to gain valuable insights and identify opportunities for maximizing returns.

Try FineReport Now

Challenges of Making Financial Dashboards

Crafting and constructing financial dashboards can pose a challenge due to the diverse data and insights required by different teams. Consolidating all this information is a daunting task, particularly if you still rely on Excel spreadsheets.

While sales dashboards focus on future prospects, accounting primarily focuses on analyzing the same metrics retrospectively. Even with an executive dashboard that integrates both perspectives, making business decisions based on accurate financial figures is still uncertain if the dashboard doesn’t retrieve data in real-time.

The solution does not entail adding more financial dashboards to bridge the gaps.

Instead, the key lies in leveraging financial business intelligence, a purpose-built approach that extracts data from various sources and distills the numbers in a manner comprehensible to the entire organization.

Your dashboards should not simply display numbers on a screen; they ought to emphasize the narrative and insights underlying those numbers, enabling more strategic, real-time decision-making.

There are also some other key challenges that will often be encountered during the process of creating financial dashboards:

  1. Data Integration: One of the primary challenges is integrating data from various sources. Finance and accounting teams often deal with data residing in multiple systems, such as accounting software, ERP systems, spreadsheets, and data warehouses. Ensuring seamless data integration and accuracy across these sources can be complex and time-consuming.
  2. Data Quality and Consistency: Maintaining data quality and consistency is essential for reliable financial insights. Inaccurate or inconsistent data can lead to erroneous conclusions and decisions. It requires establishing data governance protocols, implementing data validation mechanisms, and addressing data cleansing and normalization issues.
  3. Data Security: Financial data is highly sensitive and requires robust security measures. Protecting data integrity, confidentiality, and compliance with regulatory requirements pose significant challenges. Implementing access controls, encryption, and audit trails are essential to mitigate security risks.
  4. Identifying Relevant Metrics: Selecting the right metrics to display on the dashboard is crucial. It requires a deep understanding of the organization’s financial goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). Choosing too many metrics can overwhelm users while including too few may lead to incomplete insights.
  5. Real-Time Data Updates: Timeliness of data is paramount for accurate decision-making. Dashboards that rely on manual data updates or batch processes may introduce delays and compromise real-time insights. Ensuring seamless data connectivity and automating data updates become critical challenges.
  6. Scalability and Customization: As organizations grow and evolve, their financial reporting requirements change. Scaling the dashboard to accommodate new data sources, expanding user base, and incorporating customized reporting needs can pose challenges. Flexibility and adaptability are key to meeting evolving business demands.

How to Effectively Make a Financial Dashboard?

The challenges mentioned earlier in creating financial dashboards can be effectively addressed by utilizing suitable dashboard software solutions. In this section, we will explore key strategies for effectively creating a financial dashboard that overcomes these challenges and enables seamless data integration, accurate insights, user-friendly interfaces, and real-time updates.

Step1: Define Clear Objectives

Prior to embarking on the creation of financial dashboards, it is important to consider the intended audience of the report. The content of the financial report should be tailored to cater to the specific needs of different readers. For instance, providing a non-specialist reader with a concise financial dashboard featuring key financial indicators would be more suitable compared to a comprehensive dashboard containing all intricate metrics. To avoid the hassle of selecting indicators each time, utilizing a tool that can store various financial dashboard templates becomes essential. In this regard, I highly recommend FineReport, a professional reporting tool that allows the customization and storage of templates. With FineReport, you can simply modify the data within these templates whenever the need arises.

Furthermore, monthly financial dashboards are often required by company managers. The manual creation of such reports involves repetitive tasks. However, FineReport offers the convenience of automating the regular delivery of reports to managers, saving you from the burden of repetitive work.

Step2: Select the Right Dashboard Software

Choose a dashboard software that offers comprehensive features for data integration, visualization, and customization. FineReport, for example, provides a user-friendly interface, extensive connectivity options, and advanced visualization capabilities, making it an ideal solution for creating powerful financial dashboards.

Try FineReport Now

Step3: Streamline Data Integration

Data collection, in comparison to other stages, can be quite exhausting when it comes to the financial dashboard. Nevertheless, it is a crucial step that greatly impacts the accuracy of the report. Initially, you must gather and organize the original receipts, followed by preparing relevant accounting vouchers. These conventional approaches tend to consume a significant amount of time, particularly for beginners. This is where a proficient reporting tool can lend a hand. FineReport offers valuable assistance by facilitating data connectivity across diverse systems, streamlining the process of collecting financial data while upholding data accuracy.

Additionally, FineReport’s automatic reporting feature enables real-time reporting data updates, eliminating the need for manual modifications and enhancing overall work efficiency.

Step4: Ensure Data Accuracy and Consistency

Implement data governance protocols and validation mechanisms within the dashboard software to ensure data quality and consistency. FineReport’s data validation features enable you to detect and address data inconsistencies, resulting in reliable financial insights.

Step5: Design User-Friendly Interfaces

Pay attention to the design and layout of your financial dashboard. Opt for dashboard software that offers intuitive drag-and-drop functionalities and customizable templates. FineReport’s flexible interface allows you to design user-friendly dashboards that cater to different user preferences and levels of financial expertise.

FineReport, a specialized professional reporting tool, is renowned for its expertise in financial solutions. It offers a diverse range of templates and samples that cater not only to financial statements but also to financial analysis. Within FineReport, you can take advantage of three pre-designed financial statement templates, which significantly streamline the process, saving valuable time and effort.

In addition, FineReport presents various financial dashboards that excel at visualizing financial data, thereby enhancing the efficiency of financial analysis. The user-friendly Excel-like designer provided by FineReport simplifies the entire process. Upon collecting the required data, you can effortlessly design the layout and generate reports through a convenient drag-and-drop approach. The dashboards are designed to present key indicators in a visually intuitive manner, enabling managers to promptly identify issues and make necessary adjustments to their decisions.

Step6: Choose Relevant Metrics

Select the most relevant metrics and KPIs to display on your financial dashboard. Collaborate with stakeholders to identify the key performance indicators that align with your organization’s financial objectives. FineReport’s customizable visualization options empower you to present meaningful and actionable insights to users.

Step7: Enable Real-Time Updates

Ensure that your financial dashboard software supports real-time data updates. FineReport’s data connectivity features enable seamless integration with live data sources, ensuring that your dashboard reflects the most current financial information for informed decision-making.

Step8: Regular Review and Refinement

Continuously review and refine your financial dashboard to align with evolving business needs. Seek feedback from users and stakeholders to identify areas for improvement and incorporate new metrics or visualizations as required.

Summary

In conclusion, a financial dashboard is a powerful tool that provides a comprehensive view of an organization’s financial performance. By visualizing key financial metrics and indicators, it enables informed decision-making and facilitates proactive financial management.

Throughout this article, we have explored the concept of a financial dashboard, highlighted real-world examples, and discussed the challenges that come with creating such dashboards. We have also provided insights on how to effectively overcome these challenges and create impactful financial dashboards.

To streamline your financial reporting and analysis processes, we highly recommend trying out FineReport, a professional reporting tool. FineReport offers a range of templates, customization options, and seamless data integration capabilities, making it an ideal choice for designing and implementing effective financial dashboards. Download FineReport today and experience the benefits of visualizing and analyzing your financial data in a user-friendly and efficient manner.

Remember, a well-designed financial dashboard can unlock valuable insights, enhance decision-making, and drive financial success for your organization. Embrace the power of financial dashboards and take your financial management to new heights with FineReport.

Try FineReport Now

Feel free to make an appointment for a live demo with our product experts. We will be more clear about your needs and see how FineReport can help you and your organization transform data into value.

Book A Demo

Explore Other Resources

Company News | 6 min read
FanRuan has once again received an Honorable Mention in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms. As the only independent BI…
05-25-2023
Dashboard Tools | 19 min read
This guide provides a comprehensive overview of sales dashboards, including their definition, significance, steps for creating one, and useful tips. Additionally, we will offer various…
05-15-2023
Data Analysis | 16 min read
This article concludes 3 basic steps to an effective financial statement analysis for newbies, from definition to financial analysis methods and tools.
10-30-2019