To keep your finances from hitting sour notes!
You definitely need your own home dashboard!
In any unclear situation, make a dashboard — I think that’s the credo of a business analyst! In general, the more people work with data, the more seriously they take their personal finances. So, no one is surprised anymore by spreadsheets with income, expenses, and taxes.
At some point, the numbers start to overwhelm you!… I thought that this problem must have been solved a thousand times, and such dashboards must exist. What’s stopping you from creating a personal home dashboard in a free version of a BI package and storing it on your computer for personal use, updating it from your own Excel files or Google Sheets?..
It’s especially convenient if you have a habit of monitoring your finances and making statements from banking services, etc.
The task looks useful and interesting, but to avoid reinventing the wheel, my team and I first conducted research to see what modern dashboards for personal finances look like and how convenient and useful they appear to be.
And here are the results of our research!
1. Mynda Treacy
The personal finance dashboard by Mynda Treacy! Our constant jury member at the MYDS Dataviz Award!
Mynda works in MS Excel — a very accessible tool for managing personal finances, though creating a dashboard in Excel is not easy for everyone!
This is a very interesting example, featuring KPI cards, fascinating charts like treemaps and donut charts, and even a waterfall chart!
You can see the details of its application on Mynda’s YouTube channel!
2. Ajelix
Ajelix.com also has offerings on personal dashboards — here’s their template for an Excel dashboard too.
3. Monarch
Monarch offers both desktop and mobile solutions that are quite sophisticated.
For example, they feature a beautiful Sankey diagram — a strong argument in any financial discussion!
Here are some examples in BI packages! Let’s start with my favorite, Power BI! Since its desktop version is free, anyone can try to develop their own dashboard.
4. Personal Finance Dashboard using Power BI
Power BI dashboard by ppraju12 is widely discussed with community! We also see KPI cards and interesting diagrams here, although they may be a bit too complex for such a small dataset.
5. Break your budget
“Break your budget” sells a rather complex dashboard that allows you to track personal goal achievements! An interesting perspective!
6. Etsy collection
And on Etsy, of course, you’ll find a huge number of offers with templates for personal finances! Yep, that industry is really thriving!
7.Empower
Interesting offer from Empower — it also includes both desktop and mobile versions, which I suppose is quite convenient.
8. Other Level’s
A bright dashboard from Other Level’s looks appealing, although the structure is a bit disorderly. But look at that dog in the bottom right corner! Two thumbs up!
Now let’s move from applications to Tableau!
Surprisingly, in this package known for its beautiful visualizations in personal finance, things aren’t so great. Perhaps because the free version of Tableau stores your data in a shared cloud, which isn’t suitable for everyone… In the new update, this should change, so let’s see if it affects the variety of financial solutions!
10. Project by John David Sant
Check this interesting project! Link is here.
Important Accounting Areas
So, to sum up, let’s list what we would like to see on the personal finance dashboard!
Excluding data collection, unfortunately, it’s still a semi-manual process — not all banks provide automated data extracts in the format you need or to the place you prefer… And built-in banking dashboards and spend classifiers are far from perfect. Moreover, if your funds are in multiple banks, you still need to gather all of this in one place!
Important Accounting Areas:
- Taxation
- Housing Expenses
- Medical Expenses
- Social Benefits and Pensions
- Loans and Savings
Do you agree, or is there anything you would like to add?
Well, the topic turned out to be really interesting, it even made me think about developing my own product in this niche.
But for now, if you need a stylish and convenient dashboard on any topic, you can always create one in half an hour using our excellent Power BI Guideline!
It includes not only ready-made templates but also a visualization compass with tips on when and how to use specific charts, as well as basic theory on working with diagrams! Check it!
