Financial performance in a single view

What this dashboard answers

Revenue for the year, and whether it actually grew. In this dataset it is $12.4M, up 14.9% on the prior year. Directly beside it, operating expense and whether that grew faster: here $2.4M, up 12.3%. Those two numbers next to each other are most of what a monthly leadership meeting is about.

Then EBITDA, which in this demo is negative at $133.1K against a positive prior year, with a waterfall showing exactly where the swing came from. Gross profit and gross margin percent are plotted month by month, so a bad quarter is visible as a shape rather than as a single number. A spend breakdown splits the money into cost of goods at roughly 75 percent, operating expense at 19, and other expense at 6.

It compares to last year, not to a budget

Worth being precise about, because the two get conflated. Every comparison on this report is year over year. It tells you whether the business is doing better than it was, not whether it is doing what you said it would do.

Budget variance is a different build and needs a budget loaded as data. Plenty of companies want it and it is straightforward to add, but it is not what this report is doing.

The second page is the actual P&L

Behind the summary sits a full monthly profit and loss: revenue, cost of goods sold, gross profit and gross profit percent, operating expense, operating profit, other income and expense, amortization, depreciation, net profit and net profit percent, then EBITDA in dollars and percent. Every month across the year, filterable by date range, quarter, and month.

That combination is the part that matters. Somebody sees an odd month on the summary and can go straight to the line item that caused it, in the same report, without asking anyone to pull anything.

Where the data comes from

The general ledger. QuickBooks for smaller companies, or the finance module of an ERP such as Sage, SAP, Epicor, Jobscope, or FDM4 once a business has outgrown it.

Nothing here requires replacing a system. Power BI reads what the ledger already holds, on a schedule. The refresh timestamp sits on the report itself, so nobody has to wonder how current it is.

What it takes to build

Mostly modeling, not visuals. The chart of accounts has to be mapped to a reporting structure leadership recognizes, and each measure defined once so it means the same thing everywhere.

Agreeing what EBITDA includes takes longer than building the waterfall that displays it. That definition work is what stops two people arriving at the same meeting with two different numbers.

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