Financial Dashboard Software Solutions

Because financial dashboards can include so many different pieces of data from different sources, it’s critical to stick to the most important metrics. Our experts recommend including core elements like high-level KPIs (revenue vs. budget, EBITDA margin, etc.), period-over-period trends, and forecasts vs. actuals. On top of these visualizations, it can be helpful to include drill-down functionality to dive deeper into data, as well as customizable views tailored to certain roles or product lines.

Out of the box, Excel has difficulties creating effective financial dashboards because it isn’t designed for real-time data updates and can slow down with large datasets. Limited automation and collaboration functionality further restrict your ability to make useful financial dashboards. However, insightsoftware platforms like Wands for Oracle/SAP, Spreadsheet Server, Jet Reports, and more have revolutionized this. These tools can connect directly to your ERP, data warehouses, and planning systems — and update these numbers directly within Excel. They also provide libraries of pre-built dashboard templates and functions so you don’t have to start from scratch, with dynamic charts and tables that you can refresh with a single click. In other words, insightsoftware combines the familiarity of Excel with our automation and advanced reporting capabilities to upgrade your financial dashboards.

Power BI is more suited to create financial dashboards than Excel. Start by gathering your financial data, such as spreadsheets, accounting software, databases, and cloud services. You’ll then need to clean and transform your data (handle missing values, create calculated columns, etc.) so it can be visualized, before setting up data models and relationships. This might include defining relationships between tables, connecting related columns, and more. After all of this, you’re ready to design the actual dashboard and create visualizations (see our in-depth guide to dashboard design here).

However, adding interactivity, drill-through functionality, data quality validation, real-time updates, and more can be difficult with Power BI’s rigid limitations. This is where platforms like Power ON come in handy for real-time Power BI write-back. Power ON enables faster edits within your BI dashboards for more efficient planning and scenario modeling. For those using Oracle EBS, SAP ECC, or S/4HANA data with Power BI, Wands for Oracle and Wands for SAP further enhance your financial dashboards by simplifying data extraction and custom report creation so you can focus more on analysis and less on tedious manual exports.

When presenting these dashboards, our financial analysis experts recommend tailoring them to specific audiences. It helps to have certain views that serve as executive summaries, and others that get more into the weeds of operational data. You should also draw attention to certain areas of your dashboards using colors to highlight variances or other callouts. We always suggest incorporating interactive elements as well, so viewers can explore on their own and filter by department, region, time period, etc. Lastly, it’s important to tell a story with your data — when possible, try to logically group metrics and use visual cues to direct the narrative.

Thankfully, your financial dashboards don’t have to be manually updated or built. Automation and data governance are at the heart of insightsoftware platforms, including our financial dashboards. Tools like Wands for SAP and Wands for Oracle streamline data extraction and refreshes from your ERP systems, while also scheduling dashboard distribution (either time-based or event-triggered). Automated variance calculations and version control further enhance your budgeting and forecasting capabilities, revolutionizing processes that used to rely on manual exports and sluggish Excel formulas.

Automating your financial dashboards with insightsoftware comes with a variety of advantages:

• All your data is current and immediately up-to-date, which is critical for fast-paced sectors.
• Data accuracy improves as a result of eliminating copy-paste errors and manual data manipulation.
• Teams become more efficient because their time is freed up to analyze data instead of collecting and cleaning it.
• Quicker refreshes mean more flexible budget updates, reforecasting, and scenario modeling so your team can be more agile.
• Scaling is more feasible with automated workflows, pre-built templates, and more that extend financial dashboards across teams or geographies.

When evaluating modern financial dashboard software, look for features like:

• Live data connectivity across your systems
• Interactive drill-down (e.g. from summary to subledger)
• Customizable templates for different users/audiences
• Variance and trend analysis capabilities
• Embedded commentary for collaboration and narrative
• Mobile accessibility so users can use dashboards anywhere

While there are a lot of no-code financial dashboard tools on the market, many sacrifice functionality for the sake of simplicity. insightsoftware platforms like Wands, Jet Reports, and Spreadsheet Server combine Excel’s intuitive interface with deep utility for rich, interactive, and shareable financial dashboards. For those looking to embed dashboards and analytics within other applications, Logi Symphony easily accomplishes this with drag-and-drop editors, no coding required. Other options like Qlik or Tableau offer no-code dashboard creation, but these usually don’t include the strong ERP integrations that insightsoftware tools are built with, and lack the advanced visualizations or financial-specific logic that our platforms provide out of the box.

Many general business intelligence tools like Power BI are popular for financial dashboard creation, but often lack the customization or interactive elements that purpose-built dashboard solutions include. Excel-based tools like Jet Reports can add slicers, pivot-like drill-downs, and other interactive chart features. Spreadsheet Server and our Wands platforms also integrate with Excel and your ERP to create real-time dashboards that use interactive Excel tools like formulas, tables, filters, conditional formatting, and more. Logi Symphony goes a step further to embed interactive dashboards within other applications for AI-enhanced self-service capabilities — no extensive coding required.

insightsoftware offers a range of financial dashboards, including ones for financial reporting, budgeting, forecasting, and analytics. With our tools, you can create strategic or executive dashboards (CXO), analytical dashboards (Spreadsheet Server, Wands for SAP/Oracle, Jet Reports), operational dashboards (Power ON, Jet Analytics), and budgeting/forecasting dashboards (Bizview, Longview Plan, Hubble).

Yes. insightsoftware’s dashboards are highly customizable, allowing you to tailor them to your organization’s unique requirements and preferences. You can then save the customized version as a new template to re-use in the future.

Very easy. insightsoftware’s solutions are designed to seamlessly integrate with various data sources, including more than 200 ERPs, cloud systems, data warehouses, spreadsheets, and other sources. Our pre-built connectors make setup even easier, and preconfigured workflows make refreshing your data a breeze.

Yes. insightsoftware’s dashboards are accessible on mobile devices through web browsers or dedicated mobile apps, providing flexibility for users on the go.

Our financial dashboard tools (Wands, Spreadsheet Server, and Jet Reports) come with a variety of features and characteristics that make them stand out. Instead of master-of-none BI tools that happen to include basic dashboarding capabilities, our platforms are built from the ground up to be the best financial dashboard solutions available. Not only that, but they’re designed specifically with finance teams in mind, offering compliant templates to get dashboard creation off the ground faster. Our deep integrations across ERP systems like Oracle EBS, SAP S/4HANA, Dynamics 365, NetSuite, and more all enable finance professionals to analyze real-time data like never before. This doesn’t stop at the KPI level, though — our dashboards include drill-down capabilities to go beyond the surface-level analytics and identify the source of change. Lastly, our scalable architecture is unmatched, enabling large dataset manipulation in Excel without crippling performance and responsiveness.

insightsoftware provides comprehensive support and training resources, including documentation, tutorials, webinars, and customer support channels, to help users effectively utilize their financial dashboards. We also offer onboarding and implementation services tailored to your ERP stack, 24/7 global support with offices worldwide, as well as template libraries and best-practice playbooks.