Everything You Need on Your FP&A Dashboard

Why FP&A Dashboards Matter

FP&A dashboards used to be, broadly speaking, about Excel tables and graphs, and financial metrics. The dashboard was essentially a convenient place to put the key financial facts in one place for ease of reference. Today’s dashboards fill that role, but they have also evolved to become far more. 

FP&A dashboards are important for both FP&A teams and the wider organization because:

• They bring together crucial data from across departments, breaking down silos and showing vital interrelationships
• They represent a single source of truth that can be referred to easily at any time
• They enable smooth, continuous tracking of essential KPIs and goals
• They show the connection between strategy and specific KPIs/OKRs
• They provide a real-time snapshot of business performance, and the context of business performance over time, in one place

Great FP&A dashboards that are used wisely are dashboards that reflect, embody and drive value for a company. 

FP&A Dashboard Strategy

There’s usually one dashboard that rules them all. This would be the main dashboard, frequently referred to by everyone working in FP&A and often by the CFO and other important internal stakeholders. This will typically focus on the metrics that when put together give a meaningful and actionable picture of the company. 

That said, FP&A teams will often work on a multi-dashboard strategy, with supplementary dashboards focusing on specific areas of the company, business or product. Specific campaigns may have their own dashboard, for example, or certain operations. Collaborations or knock-on effects connecting different departments might be well tracked through a dashboard. Financial planning and analysis has many elements. 

FP&A dashboards work most effectively when there is a strategy behind them, meaning that the FP&A team engages in a conscious process of determining which areas they need to distill into dashboards, and which metrics should be included. 

Also, it’s best to have individuals responsible for tracking and maintaining each dashboard, and for these people to also have the responsibility of sharing any important trends or shifts with the relevant team members or colleagues. 

Individual FP&A analysts, of course, often have their own personal dashboards that can empower and expand the scale of their work.

Use AI in FP&A Dashboards to Get More Done

Gathering data for dashboards and keeping them up to date used to be a very manual process, which made it time-consuming, tedious and prone to error. Automation and AI has changed what’s possible for FP&A dashboards in a profound way. 

With automation, it’s possible to ensure that the data is automatically centralized in a dedicated FP&A platform such as Firmbase, meaning that the dashboards can consistently draw on the most recent, accurate information.

With AI, FP&A teams can do far more with the data brought together in a dashboard. With AI to do the heavy lifting and constant monitoring, FP&A professionals can focus on the impact, strategy and next steps that matter. 

As Forrester has noted, AI is center stage, and this changes the picture in numerous ways. For instance, Firmbase AI can:

• Identify anomalies, pinpoint root causes and suggest explanations in seconds.
• Make smart data mapping not only possible but an easy, intuitive element of daily work and analysis, in turn enabling automated data workflows and deeper financial analysis.
• Answer questions asked in natural language about metrics, budgets, KPIs and more by drawing on the information from diverse sources.
• Empower collaboration between departments by making data easily accessible and comprehensible for everyone. 

Digging Into the FP&A Dashboard

The specific metrics you will want in your FP&A dashboard or dashboards will depend in part on your industry. What you need as a manufacturing company will be very different to what you need in a SaaS company, for example. You measure success in different ways, the flags that signal there might be issues ahead are different, and your goals will be accordingly diverse as well. 

It’s also important to note that what you have in the dashboard might change over time, depending on the situation and priorities of the business as a whole, or of specific areas of the business. A company that’s in hyper growth mode will be focused on different things to a company maximizing efficiency and cost cutting, for instance. 

FP&A Dashboard Details

Although what’s best for your dashboard will vary according to the specifics of your business, there are some things that are fairly consistent in creating effective dashboards for most FP&A teams:

• The dashboard should be built around the main goal of your business. You want to know if you’re achieving it, and where you might need to adjust. 
• Make sure you include the main elements that contribute to the success or failure of your primary goal. 8-15 metrics is enough for the dashboard; more and it becomes unwieldy. 
• Consider having two “tiers” of metrics, to distinguish between the primary ones that rarely change status and the secondary ones that you might mix up more often. 
• Metrics should be strategic, not tactical – you want the main points that are related to impact, and they need to be the ones that, when put together, tell the story you need to know. 
• Document your dashboard-building and changing process. It should always be easy to check where data comes from, and how calculations are made. 
• Use color coding (traffic light colors are often popular) so you can see performance at a glance. However, make sure use of color is consistent. 
• It can be tempting to include a variety of different types of graphs because different metrics are best expressed in different ways. There is a place for this. However, it’s important not to overdo this because it is distracting and slows viewers down as they work out what is going on in each graph.
• Review your dashboard from time to time. Think through whether there could be edge cases of issues not flagged by positive results in your dashboards, or whether a lot of “orange/red” might not convey important strengths that need to be part of the picture.

Autonomy in Creating FP&A Dashboards

Since the data you want crystalized in your dashboard may vary over time, and actionable dashboards can be extremely useful in helping you track the state of your business, it’s vital for the FP&A team to have autonomy when it comes to their dashboard. 

You do not want to be dependent on your internal engineering team, or on a third party, to manage your dashboards or make changes to them for you. For this reason, a dedicated no-code platform such as Firmbase is often the best fit for FP&A teams working in dynamic environments. 

That way your team can make the best use possible of their FP&A dashboards, leveraging them for strategic tracking, planning and decision making and ensuring they adapt smoothly as required to changing circumstances.