10 Excel Dashboards to Understand ANY business

A picture is worth a thousand words, but a dashboard is worth a thousand insights. And after sitting in on dozens of board meetings and leadership meetings with clients, I found there really are only about 10 or [music] so dashboards that you need to understand a business. So, in this video, I'm going to walk you through my favorite dashboards in [music] any financial report that I share. And if you stick around till the end, I'll show you how you can get every single one of them connected to your data. Check the comments below. There's a link to get one of these dashboard templates for free. Let's go ahead and begin starting with our first dashboard. This profit and loss over here. Now, if you're not familiar with what a profit and loss is, it allows you to understand your income accounts via revenue and other income and your expense accounts via your cost of goods sold, operating expenses, and other expenses over here. And what's neat is it also will then summarize your profitability between your gross profit, net operating income, and net [music] income. Now, this is probably the most popular financial report out there and is the way that you could understand whether your business is generating a profit or not. But there are a few things that are different about this report that I want to highlight. First, notice how I have this as a condensed profit and loss. Instead of showing each and every single account, I'm instead summarizing all of that information. And the way that I did that was I have a drivers tab that has every single account on my profit and loss and then I just have a summary grouping column that shows how this information gets mapped back to my summary profit and loss. But there are a few other things that I want to highlight. Notice how we have these custom periods whether that is year-to- date trailing 12 months an annual basis a quarterly basis as well as a monthly basis. And [music] what's neat about the monthly basis is if I scroll to the right, you'll see that my actuals for my accounting software ends here and then my projections start there with this neat little dotted line. So this makes it useful to then toggle between any period. And generally whenever I'm showing a financial report, I like to keep that between maybe 12 to 14 periods max. Maybe something like this that allows me to show just 2025 or maybe I'll even add in some custom columns. Now, if you're on the cash basis of accounting, this report is going to get you probably 90% of the way there.