If you’re a small business owner, freelancer, or just someone wanting to track finances, a financial dashboard offers valuable insights.
In this blog, I’ll show you how to build one using Google Sheets, making it easy to monitor your financial performance.
Step 1: Define Your Objectives
Before creating your financial dashboard, it is significant to know what you want to achieve with it.
Are you interested in tracking expenses, monitoring income, analyzing investments, or all of the above?
By making it clear what your objectives are, you can tailor your dashboard to provide the most relevant information.
An example is if you want to track your budget for the month, write down what you want for your data.
You can put on an overview which consists of the starting date and ending date of the month.
Create a cash flow, an income table, and a savings table.
Step 2: Gather your Data
Gather the necessary financial data that you will be tracking in your dashboard.
This may include income sources, expenses, investments, savings, and other relevant financial metrics.
Step 3: Design Your Dashboard Layout
Once you have your data, design the layout of your dashboard.
Google Sheets offers a range of customization options, allowing you to create a layout that suits your preferences and needs.
Consider organizing your dashboard into sections such as income expenses, savings, debt, bills, cash flow and an overview of your finances.
You can use borders to divide these sections for a cleaner look.
Highlight cells that you want for specifications, choose the colors you want.
Step 4: Use Formulas and Functions
Google Sheets has formulas and functions that can help automate calculations and data analysis.
The functions like SUM, AVERAGE, and IF statements to manipulate your data and generate insights.
Step 5: Visualize Your Data
Visualizations are important to understanding complex financial data.
There are a bunch of chart types, including the line graphs, bar charts, and pie charts, which you can use to visualize your finances.
Step 6: Add Interactivity
To make your financial dashboard more dynamic and user-friendly, add interactive elements such as drop-down menus, checkboxes, or slicers.
These features allow you to filter and analyze your data, providing a deeper insight into your finances.
Let’s say you want to use these drop-down menus for the day of the month.
Highlight the cells you want to have the drop-down to apply.
Select the “Data” part of your sheets, and choose data validation.
Add a new rule, and you will see a lot of options there.
After selecting the “Add rule,” go to the “Criteria” part and select the Drop-down.
Step 7: Regularly Update and Review
Building a financial dashboard is not a one-time task; it requires regular maintenance and updates to remain accurate and relevant.
Make it a habit to regularly update your data and review your dashboard to ensure it reflects your current financial situation accurately.
Click here to make a copy of the Financial Dashboard Template.
Conclusion
It may be hard navigating tools, and it could get frustrating, but with practice, it would be easier for you to manage.
Despite that, using Google Sheets to track your finances– whether it’s personal or for your business, helps you achieve the goals that you want for yourself.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an Executive Dashboard?
An executive dashboard is a data visualization tool that provides key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics relevant to executives and top-level management within an organization.
It offers a high-level overview of critical business information, allowing executives to quickly assess the health and performance of the organization and make informed decisions.
Executive dashboards typically consolidate data from various sources, such as sales, finance, marketing, operations, and human resources, into a single, easy-to-understand interface.
They present this data in the form of charts, graphs, tables, and other visualizations, allowing executives to gain insights at a glance.
What should a Financial Dashboard include?
A financial dashboard should include key metrics and indicators that provide a comprehensive view of an organization’s financial performance. The following can be included in a financial dashboard
- Revenue Metrics
- Expense Metrics
- Profitability Metrics
- Cash Flow Metrics
- Financial Ratios
- Budget vs. Actuals
- Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
- Trend Analysis
- Forecasting and Predictive Analysis
- Dashboards Visualization
