Top 10 Accounting KPIs and How to Calculate them in Excel?
We can calculate any Finance & Accounting KPI values using Excel easily. In this article, I am sharing the top 10 accounting KPI calculations. These are… Topics ? Net Profit Margin Net Profit Margin = Net Profit / Sales Positive profit margin indicates business is profitable while negative indicates the business is in loss. ? […]
KPI performance charts & dashboards – 43 alternatives (contest entries)
Hello all, prepare to be amazed! Here are 43 creative, fun & informative ways to visualize KPI data.
About a month ago, I asked you to visualize KPI data. We received 65 entries for this contest. After carefully reviewing the entries, our panel of judges have discarded 22 of them due to poor charting choices, errors or just plain data dumps. We are left with 43 amazing entries, each creatively analyzed the data and presented results in a powerful way.
How to read this post?
This is a fairly large post. If you are reading this in email or news-reader, it may not look properly. Click here to read it on chandoo.org.
- Each entry is shown in a box with the contestant’s name on top. Entries are shown in alphabetical order of contestant’s name.
- You can see a snapshot of the entry and more thumbnails below.
- The thumb-nails are click-able, so that you can enlarge and see the details.
- You can download the contest entry workbook, see & play with the files.
- You can read my comments at the bottom.
- At the bottom of this post, you can find a list of key charting & dashboard design techniques. Go thru them to learn how to create similar reports at work.
Thank you
Thank you very much for all the participants in this contest. I have thoroughly enjoyed exploring your work & learned a lot from them. I am sure you had fun creating these too.
So go ahead and enjoy the entries.
Contest: Visualize KPI data
Here is a quick visualization challenge for you.
There are 25 KPIs and each has a base value, current month, corresponding month values. The KPIs also have targets.
The data looks like this:
Download the data:
Click here to download the data for this contest.
Rules for this contest:
- Visualize this data using one Excel chart (one chart per KPI is ok too).
- You may omit any any data
- You can use interactive charts.
- Do not use add-ins or VBA to make your charts
Go ahead and make your chart(s).
Create a line chart with bands [tutorial]
Here is an interesting scenario.
Imagine you are responsible for customer satisfaction at ACME Inc. Every month you track customer satisfaction rate for the 3 products you sell which are conveniently named Product A, B & C.
You also have bands for the satisfaction rating.
- Rating of 85% or below is Average
- Rating between 85% & 95% is OK
- Rating above 95% is good
At the end of the year, you want to visualize the ratings for last 12 months for 3 products along with bands.
Something like above.
Unfortunately, there is no “Insert Banded line chart” button in Excel. So what to do?
That is what we will learn today. Ready?
Use Advances vs. Declines chart to understand change in values
Lets say you are responsible for sales of 100s of products (which belong to handful of categories). You are looking at sales of each product in last month & this month. And you want to understand whether sales are improving or declining by category. How would you do it?
Turns out, this is not a difficult problem. In fact, this question is asked every day & answered using Advances vs. Declines chart.
You may have seen this chart in financial newspapers or websites. Shown above, Advances vs. Declines chart tells us how many items have advanced & how many have declined.
Read on to learn how to create this chart using Excel.
Simple KPI Dashboard using Excel
Any Tom, Dick and Sally can make things complex. It takes guts and clarity to simplify things. That is why I was pleasantly surprised to see this dashboard prepared by Michigan State. You can see it in the detailed article.
Linda, one of My Excel School students shared this dashboard link with me and asked if I can show how to construct something like this. Here is my version of the dashboard.
Read this post to learn how to construct a similar dashboard on your own. Also, you can download the excel workbook and play with it.
KPI Dashboard – Revisited
In 2008, I received an email from Robert Mundigl, which was the start of a life-long friendship. Robert asked me if he can teach us how to make KPI dashboards using Excel. I gladly said yes because I am always looking for new ways to use Excel.
The original KPI dashboards using Excel article was so popular. They still help around 12,000 people around the globe every month. Many of our regular readers and members have once started their journey on Chandoo.org from these articles.
In this article, we will revisit the dashboard and give it a fresh new spin using Excel 2007.