For day 4 of dashboard week, I've been looking at some mock data regarding the financials of a fake business. I was tasked with answering a few key business questions about the business's performance and financial situation and creating a visualisation to demonstrate these findings.
The data itself came in the form of a really simple excel file that didn't require any cleaning. This seemed great initially as I was able to go straight into planning my visualisation however, it became an issue when I started to build as I struggled to find any real insights within such simple data. I did some research and decided to focus on four key KPIs for assessing the business's financial standing, total revenue, gross profit margin, working capital and operating income. I really wanted to provide some insight rather than just stating the KPIs so I investigated the inconsistent profit and found that the inconsistency came from fluctuating cost of goods. I then delved further into the cost of goods to see if there were any trends in the types of costs throughout the year. I then went on to do a review of each country within the company and a review of the assets.
The next time I make a financial dashboard I will make sure not to go too deep into the data trying to find unique insights as I didn't leave myself with enough time to visualise the facts and standard KPIs.