The Ultimate Guide to Build CFO KPIs Dashboard and Template
To improve your company’s financial position, you need to assess every aspect of your business and identify areas that need improvement. There are many factors that determine the overall financial condition of your business. But it is not that easy if you are still using the traditional approach to managing your business data.
Business Intelligence has made your job as easy as ever. It plays a vital role in any business to automate the reporting task and reduce the burden of high-level executives.
The Chief Financial Officer is always seen as the backbone of the company to strengthen the business financial position. The role of the CFO is quite difficult as they not only have to manage the ongoing financial strategy of your organization, but are also expected to provide timely, accurate reports to various stakeholders. Therefore, by having the utmost responsibility of Chief Financial Officers, CFO dashboards can enhance the performance of strategic planning as well as analytical efforts related to every financial aspect of your business.
What Is A CFO Dashboard?
CFO Dashboard is a type of financial dashboard that helps CFOs (Chief Financial Officers) and Financial Officers to organize key financial indicators in one place and communicate the most important financial information to your team in a simple and beautiful manner.
The CFO Dashboard enables faster, more accurate decision making, allowing financial managers to assess, understand, influence and optimize financial and operational performance. It typically consists of ad-hoc, static, and formatted reports and graphs that help locate financial issues and risks on the fly.
What is CFO a Report?
A graphical and visual representation of key financial KPIs in a CFO report that can be shared via dashboards, shared URLs, or embedded in any website or application.
CFO reports can be viewed through the CFO Dashboard which contains all business financial information of past, present and predictive real time business insights.
CFO officers create and implement financial strategies that manage an organization’s past, present, and future financial conditions and operations. The CFO oversees financial statements, manages liquidity, analyzes financial reports, and forecasts future cash flows within the organization. The chief financial officer typically reports to the CEO, as well as the board of directors.
Things to Keep in Mind When Creating a CFO Dashboard
Focusing on the below points and the right tools will help in building a successful CFO dashboard:
Understand final financial goals
The initial steps are to understand your business financial goals ultimately it helps you to manage analytical efforts behind the dashboards. Collaboration with financial staff will also help to understand the objectives and you can easily manage dashboards accordingly.
Choose the appropriate key metrics
If your goals and objectives are defined then you should focus on selecting the right CFO Dashboard KPI which will give a clear picture of your business in the dashboard and the company will be able to take necessary decisions at a specific time.
Useful advantage of analytical capabilities
Choosing the right BI reporting tool is an important process for any business user. Business users have to collect all the details of the business and select a tool that can fulfill all the requirements of the business. Some basic features that all BI reporting tools should include:
· Tools must be flexible to customize the dashboard as per the requirements.
· Simple and easy to use UI interface with less numbers of iterations
· Dashboards must have a visual appealing element
· Dashboards must be mobile supportive
· Easy customer care support
Collaborative and In-built Dashboards
Your dashboard should provide comprehensive data and a drill-down facility to the CFO for better estimates. This will help the CFO to better examine the business financial position and know the answers to all business-critical questions.
Useful KPIs for CFO Dashboards
The following are some of the top metrics commonly used as part of a CFO dashboard.
Working Capital
Working capital is the difference between a company’s current assets and liabilities and is a measure of a company’s liquidity, operational efficiency and its short-term financial health.
Gross Profit Margin
This is one of the most important KPIs in a CFO. These KPIs are measured in percentages. Gross profit margin is calculated as the total sales revenue that your account for all direct costs associated with the production process.
Operating Cash Flow (OCF)
Operating cash flow is a measure of the amount of cash carried by a normal business operation and specifies whether it can generate sufficient positive cash flow to maintain and grow its operations.
Current Ratio
The current ratio, also known as the working capital ratio, measures the ability of a business to meet its short-term obligations that are due within a year. The ratio considers the weighting of total current assets versus total current liabilities.
Quick Ratio
The quick ratio, also known as the acid-test ratio, measures a company’s ability to pay all of its outstanding liabilities when they are due only as assets that can be quickly converted into cash.
Net Profit Margin
Net profit margin is a profitability ratio that expresses profit from business operations as a percentage of revenue or net sales.
Current Accounts Receivable
Current accounts receivable measures the amount owed a business by its debtors. The current accounts receivable metric helps to forecast upcoming revenue and plan cash flows more accurately.
Current Accounts Payable
The Current Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable metric displays the current money owed to your business as well as the amount your business owes creditors.
Cash conversion cycle
The cash conversion cycle (CCC) is an important metric for a business owner to understand. CCC is also called net operating cycle. This cycle tells the average number of days it takes a business owner to purchase inventory, and then convert it to cash.
Budget variance
Budget variance is a periodic measure used by a company to measure the difference between budgeted and actual figures for a particular accounting category.
P/E Ratio
The price to earnings ratio (P/E ratio) is the relationship between a company’s stock price and earnings per share (EPS). This is a popular ratio that gives investors a better understanding of a company’s value.
Payroll headcount ratio
Payroll Headcount Ratio used to identify and reduce unnecessary labor costs, the payroll headcount ratio gives a clear indication of how many employees are engaged in the payroll process compared to your total number of employees.
CFO Dashboard Examples
So far you now know what is the importance of CFO dashboard and what should be included in your report to make your report financially successful. Now let us discuss some real-life examples of CFO dashboard.
CFO KPI Trend
The EzInsights CFO KPI Dashboard is equipped with an important visual metrics design to help you make informed top-level financial decisions with a quick glance. This powerful CFO KPI dashboard provides in-depth insight into essential financial aspects including cash conversion cycle, working capital and budget variance.
Our executive level dashboard helps C-level who always see dashboards to make quick reference. This will help managers quickly identify areas of the business that need immediate attention, allowing you to remedy the situation before it is too late.
Primary KPIs:
· Working Capital
· Quick Ratio / Acid Test
· Budget Variance
· Vendor Payment Error Rate
· Cash Conversion Cycle
Customer Analytics Spending
Our customer analytics dashboards help you understand the customer journey and relationships with organizations. It also helps managers figure out what customers will pay you. Get customer insights and trends in a minute with our real-time customer analysis dashboard.
Primary KPIs:
· Customer churn rate
· Net Promoter Score
· Customer Satisfaction
· Average Resolution Time
· Customer Acquisition Rate
· Conversion rate
Sales Analysis Customer Trend
Our sales analysis dashboard provides detailed analysis of company sales. Our dashboard enables C-level executives and managers to effectively control and monitor sales KPIs in one central location, while guiding teams through detailed analysis of sales performance, cycle length and sales funnels.
Primary KPIs:
· Monthly Sales Growth
· Average Profit Margin
· Monthly Sales Bookings
· Sales Opportunities
· Sales Target
CFO Expense Dashboard
Organizations have many types of expenses and they plan not only the budget for revenue and income but also plan the expected expenses for the future. Our CFO Expense Dashboard lets you record monthly target and actual costs and compare to see target achievement percentages.
Primary KPIs:
· Current Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable
· Quick Ratio / Acid Test
· Accounts Payable Turnover
Benefits of using CFO Reports
Improve Business Agility
A modern CFO report is a robust and reliable tool of financial reporting. CFO Repots will enable CFO Managers to make financial decisions more easily and more effectively. Hence it will improve the overall business agility.
Avoid Financial Error and Fraud
CFO Dashboard examples and reports will help you easily identify any potential issues or inefficiencies, helping you eliminate them early on before they harm the financial health of the business.
Forecast Cash Flow
BI tools allow users to generate reports for greater business insights. By using business financial reports, the financial officer has gained the analytical ability to combine the different data areas of your business to produce insightful reports. It gives the complete business scenario of a business which helps in forecasting the cash flow.
Facilitate Business Growth
Business managers start their business to make profit from it. In a business, CFO is playing a very important role. All financial activities are dependent on him. CFOs use the CFO dashboard and make healthy decisions for the business. Running a business is complicated. There is a lot at stake, but a CFO helps reduce risk by allowing you to make the most informed financial decisions.
Strategic innovation & decision-making
The CFO always has to make an important financial decision on the spot. Traditionally, CFOs have put a lot of effort into creating a static spreadsheet and fiscal figures. They have to do manual work in every change. Today it is possible because of business intelligence to study relevant information in-depth and view dashboards at a glance. Due to this effective approach, CFOs have reduced their burden and can make safer decisions with ease.
Conclusion
In this article, we have explored all the key points of the CFO Dashboard. Companies are different and focus on different goals and criteria of success. But one thing is common if they are selecting the right KPIs which will definitely help you to take fast and well-established decisions. If you’re also interested in modern analytics and looking for a CFO dashboard for your companies, sign up with EzInsights for a free trial demo.
