Creating KPI Dashboards in Microsoft Excel is a series of 6 posts by Robert.
This 6 Part Tutorial on KPI Dashboards Teaches YOU:
Creating a Scrollable List View in Dashboard
Add Ability to Sort on Any KPI to the Dashboard
Highlight KPIs Based on Percentile
Add Microcharts to KPI Dashboards
Compare 2 KPIs in the Dashboards Using Form Controls
Show the Distribution of a KPI using Box Plots
Dashboards have become quite popular in the last few years and in spite of all the Business Intelligence software products that provide dashboards, a lot of dashboards are still implemented with Microsoft Excel.
What is a Dashboard?
According to Stephen Few, one of the world-wide leading authorities on visualization and dashboard design,
a dashboard is a visual display of the most important information […] which fits entirely on a single computer screen […]
(Information Dashboard Design, 2006)
The Scrolling Problem
Fitting on a single computer screen is the challenge this post will solve. Imagine you have a large list of 100 or more items (e.g. products, sales regions, etc.) with several corresponding Key Performance Indicators (e.g. prices, costs of goods sold, sales, etc.) and you want to show this in a table on your management dashboard. The whole table will not fit on a single computer screen anymore. Most of the time it will be sufficient to show the first or largest 10 items only. But what if the user of your dashboard wants to scroll down the table and see the rest of the data? Sure, you might teach him to go to the sheet with the data and scroll up and down there. But this is not convenient, not user-friendly, insecure and not the purpose of a dashboard.
The solution
The table on our dashboard doesn’t need much explanation. The only thing that differs from millions of other numeric tables in Excel is the slider scroll-bar between the names of the items and the data. This scroll-bar allows the user of the dashboard to walk through the whole list and see all items without leaving the dash-board. The table is small and leaves a lot of space for tables or charts on the dashboard.
Download the excel sheet containing KPI Dashboard solution to learn this better.
The implementation
- First have our raw data ready in a separate sheet, this is the easy step, you know how to get your data in to one sheet. So skip to next one.
- Next create a 10 row table for the dash board
- Insert a scroll bar form control Go to Menu > view > tool bars and select “forms” to see the forms tool bar. Select the scrollbar control from forms tool bar and draw one on your spreadsheet.
- Assign the scroll bar control to a cell right click on it and select format control option. In the dialog box, go to “control” tab and adjust the values as shown below:
- Finally write OFFSET() formula to display any consecutive 10 values in our scrollable table: OFFSET is used on the dashboard to bring back those 10 lines from the sheet with the raw data that are selected by using the scroll bar. A sample formula is shown here:
=OFFSET(Data!E5,Calculation!$D$5,0)where Data!E5 refers to the column containing the required data, Calculation!$d$5 has the current scroll bar value. That is all, you will have a small table that you can use to see all data using scroll
What next?
Make sure you have downloaded KPI Dashboard solution workbook to learn this better.
Read the next article in this series:Part 2: Add Ability to Sort on Any KPI to the Dashboard
Also, Checkout our Excel Dashboards Page for more examples and resources.
Chandoo’s note: Robert is a regular reader and commenter on this blog. Drop your comments / questions here and I am sure he will answer them 🙂
17 Responses to “Budget vs. Actual Profit Loss Report using Pivot Tables”
Good Work, Yogesh & Chandoo! Thanks.
Hi everybody,
first sorry I am late to say something about this topic;actually I was waiting last part
second I am not accountant I am an Engineer
third """"Very Important""" the idea is not about Loss but I am sure it is profit
Based on third it shows:
1- How to use EXCEL
2- How to use pivot TABLES
3- How to collect and arrange DATA
4- How to make reports
Many Thanks
Hi Yogesh and Chandoo,
Thank you for sharing your knowledge!
You guys are great!
thanks chandoo and yogesh, thanks for you lessons, are great!....i have a idea for a budget. I try to do it..... thanks for all
Thanks a lot for sharing the most powerful tool worldwide "knowledge"
Warm greetings from Peru
Hi -
This is a really great article because it's a simple and common thing you'd want to do with a pivot table but not at all obvious how to do it! So - muchas gracias to Chandoo and Yogesh!
One thing - I couldn't get past the group error in the sample file. I would click on ungroup but it didn't seem to have any effect. I'd appreciate it if anybody has any pointers here.
-Juanito
Hi Chandoo
I am also having the group error. Can't seem to ungroup? Appreciate if you explain further on the steps required in order to get to calculated items.
Many thanks and keep up the great work.
Cheers
Adam
Hi Chandoo,
I'm struggling resolving the problem depicted below:
I have a set of data, with (among others) a "Region" field (can be APJ, EMEA, or AMS), and a "Country" field.
Unfortunately, I need to group data by the following 4 Regions: APeJ, Japan, EMEA and AMS.
I first tried to make a pivot with Region and Country in the rows (or columns), and then group Country data as per the above.
Alas, as soon as I have a new Country that appear in my data set, my groupings are broken, and I have to redo the job of ungrouping, grouping etc.
I thought I could try to use calculated item, by adding first a new column to my dataset concatenating Region_Country, and create an "APeJ" calculated item that would sum all the "APJ_*" and substract the "APJ_Japan", but again, no clue, as I can't find a way to use any wild card in those formulas.
Given that I already found extremely helpful tips and tricks in your site that helped me manage that bunch of data, I'm pretty sure you'll have a bright idea on how I can solve that one!
Thanks in advance for your lights!
Hi Catherine...
In such cases, I advice using an additional column in the data itself. You can set-up a grouping table else where with country in first column, region in second column. And then in the data, you can add an extra column and use VLOOKUP to fetch the region based on the country.
Then feed this entire data (with extra column) to pivot table and use the extra column to group the data.
Hi Chandoo,
Thank you for your prompt answer.
I finally came to the same conclusion - after a rest 🙂 . I was probably too tired Friday evening (it was rather late), having spent hours in manipulating all my surveys data so as to pull rolling averages, make nice graphs and so on, and was trying to find a complex solution when there was a simple one.
Thanks again,
Catherine
Hey,
Great post!
I for example have different database structure with the following fields :
Date, Expense, Income, Sum (Income - Expense), Category (Sales, Cost of Goods and etc).
Creating a P&L report for the whole year works great. Including gross margin % and etc.
Though, creating P&L report by QTR/Month is becoming impossible since i get the following error : “This PivotTable report field is grouped. You cannot add calculated item to grouped filed.”
Is there a solution for this kind of problem?
Like Adam and Juanito, I also cannot ungroup.
Would appreciate it if you can add a few more lines and a screenshot or two on where to put the mouse cursor to ungroup.
Hi, I have figured out the ungrouping problem. One of the earlier steps was to group by month, if you pull the month back down to the column then right click and then select ungroup, then pull the month back up so you end up with just data source and budget/actual as the headings, then you can continue on.
To solve the ungroup problem, my method is:
Copy the "data" sheet to a whole new Excel workbook
and directly work on Part 6.
And since it is a fresh copy, Excel don't show me the "can't ungroup" problem. Hope this help.
Thank you Yogesh for this wonderful tutorial.
Kent, Malaysia
Just when i thought pivots were awesome i learn about inserting the calculated fields and that makes them more awesome. chandoo where have you been all my life.
Hello - your P&L pivot version has really impressed my boss and would like to use it. I have applied it for a actual vs budget vs forecast model I have created. One problem. In your variance above the operating profit percent % variance shows 33.8% but I want it to show (0.01) point or the true diff from prior budget.
I know I can add calculation to the side but boss would like to see it in pivot table.
Please help
Thanks
I have a further query which may solve my above dilemma. Is it possible to add a column that calculates percent increase. So in the example above a new column would be added to show variance %.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks