Financial charts & graphs are very useful in helping businesses keep an eye on key financial metrics, spot trends and take action quickly. They help you set financial goals and measure performance against them. Here are the top financial charts and graphs, with financial graph examples, that every business must monitor regularly on a business dashboard.
Key Financial Charts and Graphs for Every Business
Here are the key financial charts and graphs you must monitor regularly. You can use these accounting graphs & charts as reference when you build metrics for business dashboard reporting.
1. Gross Profit Margin
Gross Profit Margin in an accounting KPI that tells you what percent of your revenue is profit, after you have deducted all direct expenses from it. Here’s the formula to calculate Gross Profit Margin.
Gross profit margin = (revenue earned – costs of goods sold) ÷ revenue
Here Cost of goods sold means all the costs that are directly related to your product/service. It doesn’t include operating expenses, interests, and taxes.
Your Gross Profit Margin should be high enough to cover fixed costs associated with your business and still leave you with profits. Only then you’ll be able to invest in growing your business via marketing campaigns.
You can easily visualize it with a line chart using a data visualization software.
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2. Net Profit
Net Profit is what you’re left with after you have deducted all the expenses from your revenue. It is basically,
Net Profit = Total Revenue – Total Expenses
You need to include both direct as well as indirect expenses while calculating Net Profit. Otherwise, you might underestimate your expenses and overestimate your profit, leading to shortage of cash.
The more your net profit, the better it is. It leaves you with more room to invest money back into your business and grow it further.
You can plot it on a line chart or a column graph using a dashboard software
Column chart is the best graph to show profit and loss.
3. Net Profit Margin
Like Gross Profit Margin, Net Profit Margin also tells you what percentage of your revenue is profit. However, it includes all expenses, including non-operational ones.
Net profit margin = (total revenue – total expenses) ÷ total revenue
Why do you need both Gross Profit Margin as well as Net Profit Margin? It is because their difference gives you an idea of non-operational expenses. If your Gross Margin is high and Net Profit Margin is too low, then it means you need to cut back on non-essential expenses to increase net profit. Net Profit Margin is one of the most important financial charts and graphs.
Like Gross Margin, Net Profit Margin can be visualized using line chart or column graph, using a reporting tool.
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4. Aging Accounts Receivables
This is not an accounting metric but simply a list of all pending invoices and memos that have not been paid so far. If you have too many unpaid invoices/memos then it can cause serious liquidity crunch in your organization. You don’t want too many customers owing you money. Else you won’t be able to pay for your business’ expenses.
You can simply track this using a tabular financial report.
Similarly, you can also track Accounts Receivable Turnover Ratio that tells you how quickly your organization is able to collect outstanding payments. You can group your customers based on number of days it takes them to pay outstanding amount, and track it using a column chart as shown below
5. Current Ratio
Current Ratio is one of the most useful financial charts and graphs to track liquidity. You can use it to determine if you’ll be able to make a big purchase. Your creditors will also use this to find out if you can repay their loan, before extending a line of credit.
Current ratio = current assets ÷ current liabilities
Current assets are cash + all those things that can be liquidated within 1 year. Current liabilities are all the debts that you need to pay within next 1 year.
Ideally, current ratio should be between 1.5% to 3%. If your current ratio is less than 1% it means you are likely to face liquidity crunch very soon.
So track current ratio regularly to ensure that your business isn’t caught off-guard.
There are many more financial metrics and KPIs that are industry-specific. For example, an online business might need to track cost of customer acquisition or website traffic, while ecommerce business might be interested in average cart size. Nevertheless, the above 5 Financial charts and graphs must be monitored by every business.
Financial dashboard is one of the key types of business dashboards for every business. You can plot the above-mentioned on a business dashboard, share it with your team and monitor regularly. Hopefully, these financial charts and graphs can help you drive your business in the right direction. If you want to create business dashboards, reports & charts, you can try Ubiq. We offer a 14-day free trial!
Sreeram Sreenivasan is the Founder of Ubiq. He has helped many Fortune 500 companies in the areas of BI & software development.