It's nearly impossible for finance teams to influence decisions in real time without easy access to timely data.
When insights are confined to disparate systems and spreadsheets, executives can't act fast enough to double down on what's working or cut underperforming spend. Meanwhile, finance becomes an order-taker, spending valuable time on ad hoc reporting instead of strategic business partnering.
Creating dashboards for your business’s priority KPIs is a great way to keep critical data top-of-mind and in a format that’s easy to share with stakeholders across the company.
Power BI is a great tool for this, as it provides interactive visualizations, drill-down capabilities, and ways to connect metrics to their drivers. But how you design them determines whether they drive decisions or just display data.
In this article, we’ll show you six Power BI dashboard examples that finance teams can use to drive decisions, based on what we’ve helped our own customers build.
We’ll dive into what makes them effective, which KPIs to include in your dashboards, and how to build yours to enable self-service analytics without sacrificing data integrity.
Finance dashboards help executives make faster decisions and enable stakeholders to find answers themselves (saving your finance team valuable time to focus on forecasting, scenario planning and analysis instead of ad hoc reporting).
Here are six Power BI finance dashboard examples, along with ideas for which KPIs and visuals to use in yours.
An executive summary dashboard gives finance teams and leadership a high-level view of the company's overall financial health. It pulls data from multiple sources, including budgets, forecasts, and actuals, and consolidates them into a single snapshot.
An executive summary dashboard built with Power BI embedded in Vena, showing revenue growth scorecards, OPEX breakdown, profitability trends, gross margin by city, and revenue by geographic region.
The goal of this dashboard is to make it easy for executives to spot trends, address issues early, and act on opportunities. Think about it as answering three critical questions:
Are we on track to hit our revenue and profit targets?
What's driving our performance (positive and negative)?
Where are our biggest opportunities and risks?
Power BI's interactive features let users hover over or click on any chart to drill into details, so they can explore the data themselves without requesting custom reports.
Hovering over or clicking on charts shows additional context and breakdowns, eliminating the need for custom reports.
The KPIs you track will, of course, depend on your company's goals and industry, but an executive summary dashboard can generally cover:
Revenue and growth: Actuals versus budget and forecast, with variance percentages and growth rates, so executives can see if the business is meeting targets and how performance is trending.
Profitability: Gross margin, net income, and profitability trends to show how efficiently the company converts revenue to profit and where margins erode.
Operating expenses: Top expense categories and month-over-month trends to spot rising costs early and keep spending aligned with priorities.
Key performance drivers: Metrics that explain why results are changing, such as regional performance, product-level results, or headcount shifts. These connect financial outcomes to operational drivers.
To make complex data scannable for your executive summary dashboard, some effective visualizations include:
Scorecards for key metrics like revenue, EBITDA, and cash position, with color-coded variance indicators for instant status checks
Line charts for revenue and profitability trends over 6–12 months to spot patterns quickly
Waterfall charts to show how you moved from budget to actual and what drove the variance
Bar or column charts to compare performance across categories, like OPEX breakdown by department
Geographic maps or heat maps to visualize regional performance
Pro tip: You can get started with Vena's Executive Dashboard template for Power BI. If you use Vena, your budgets, forecasts, and actuals flow automatically from your planning models into the dashboard, eliminating manual data exports so that executives work with current information.
A revenue dashboard provides a detailed view of revenue performance across products, regions, customers and time periods. It connects top-line results to their drivers, making it easier to spot trends, identify opportunities and address shortfalls.
A revenue dashboard built with Power BI embedded in Vena, highlighting regional revenue flow, performance trends and growth analysis.
Think about this dashboard as answering three questions:
Are we hitting our revenue targets by region, city, or product line?
How is current performance trending compared to forecast and the prior year?
Which markets or revenue streams are driving the most growth?
These insights help Finance provide data-backed recommendations on where to invest, which markets to prioritize and how to adjust forecasts based on performance.
The metrics you track will depend on your business model and sales structure, but a revenue dashboard could include:
Revenue by segment: Break down revenue by geography, product line, customer type, or sales channel to identify growth areas and where it's lagging.
Actual vs. plan: Compare current revenue to budget and forecast with variance percentages to quickly spot gaps and course-correct.
Year-over-year growth: Track growth rates by segment to identify which areas are accelerating or decelerating.
Revenue trends over time: Show monthly or quarterly revenue trends across multiple scenarios to see how performance is evolving.
Top revenue contributors: Highlight the regions, products, or customers driving the majority of revenue to help prioritize resources.
To make revenue data actionable and easy to explore, some effective visualizations are:
Sankey or flow diagrams to show how revenue flows from high-level categories down to specific details, so it’s easy to track performance at each level
Multi-line charts to compare revenue trends across different scenarios and spot when performance diverges from plan
Variance tables with conditional formatting to highlight regions or products above or below target, with growth percentages and absolute variance
Heat maps to visualize performance across multiple dimensions and quickly spot hot and cold spots
An OpEx dashboard gives finance teams immediate visibility into operating expenses across departments, accounts, and cost centers. It shows where spending is concentrated, how costs are trending relative to budget, and what's driving the variance.
An OpEx dashboard built with Power BI embedded in Vena, with growth metrics, spending breakdowns and expense variance insights.
Think about this dashboard as answering three questions:
How are our operating expenses trending compared to budget and prior year?
Which departments or expense categories are driving cost increases?
What specific factors are influencing OpEx to go up or down?
With these insights, Finance can identify cost optimization opportunities, justify budget requests with data and help leadership make informed trade-offs between spending and priorities. When executives need to understand what's driving a specific cost increase, they can click directly into the key influencers.
Clicking on key influencers reveals detailed breakdowns, like this view showing the top five expense accounts driving salaries and wages costs.
An OpEx dashboard can track spending patterns and drivers using these KPIs:
Total OpEx variance: Actual spending vs. budget and forecast, with variance percentages (FY and YTD) to quickly assess whether costs are under control.
OpEx by department: Expenses by team or business unit to understand where cost is being spent, and which areas are over or under budget.
OpEx by account or category: Spending by expense type to identify which categories are growing fastest or consuming the most budget.
Year-over-year growth: Current period expenses vs. prior year by account to spot trends or areas where costs are accelerating.
Key cost drivers: Specific factors influencing OpEx changes, such as headcount growth, new initiatives, or vendor rate increases.
To make expense data easy to analyze and act on, some effective visualizations include:
Scorecards showing total OpEx variance and growth rates with clear indicators of whether spending is favorable or unfavorable
Treemaps to visualize spending by department or category, with size representing spend amount, making it clear where the budget is concentrated
Key influencers analysis (an AI-powered visual available in Power BI) to automatically identify and rank the factors causing OpEx to increase or decrease
Bar charts with conditional formatting to show year-over-year variance by account, highlighting which expense types are growing or shrinking fastest
Trend lines to show how OpEx has evolved over time and whether spending patterns are improving or deteriorating
A profitability dashboard gives a clear view of how efficiently the company converts revenue into profit. You can use it to track margins across different scenarios, break down profitability by location and department, and show what areas of the business are profitable and which aren’t.
A profitability dashboard built with Power BI embedded in Vena, highlighting margins, quarterly trends, and the path from revenue to profit.
Think about this dashboard as answering three questions:
Are our margins improving or declining compared to plan and prior year?
Which locations or departments are most (and least) profitable?
What's driving changes in our profitability?
Using these insights, Finance and executive leadership can guide decisions about pricing strategy, resource allocation and cost management.
A profitability dashboard should focus on margin performance and its drivers like:
Key margin metrics: Gross margin, EBITDA margin, operating margin, and net margin with comparisons to budget, forecast, and prior year.
Margin by segment: Profitability by geography, product line, customer segment, or department to identify which areas are most profitable.
Scenario analysis: Profitability across different forecast scenarios (base case vs. best case vs. worst case) to understand risk and opportunity.
Profit drivers: Components that bridge from revenue to profit, including COGS, operating expenses, depreciation and other factors impacting the bottom line.
Growth rates: How profitability is trending over time (YTD and FY) to spot acceleration or deceleration.
To make profitability data clear and actionable, some effective visualizations include:
Scorecards showing key margin percentages with year-over-year and vs. plan comparisons
Clustered bar charts with variance lines to compare profitability across multiple scenarios and time periods
Flow diagrams to trace profitability from high-level categories down to specific departments
Waterfall charts to visualize the path from revenue to EBIT or net income, showing which line items are helping or hurting profitability
Conditional formatting on margin percentages to highlight areas above or below target
A balance sheet dashboard gives finance teams a snapshot of the company's overall financial position, tracking assets, liabilities, equity, and key liquidity ratios.
It can help teams monitor working capital health, assess financial stability, and understand how the balance sheet is evolving.
A balance sheet dashboard built with Power BI embedded in Vena, showing financial ratios, year-over-year changes, turnover comparisons and working capital trends.
Think of this dashboard as answering three questions:
Is our liquidity position improving or deteriorating?
How are our key balance sheet ratios trending compared to the previous year?
What's driving changes in our working capital?
With these insights easily accessible, Finance can proactively manage cash, identify working capital issues before they become problems, and provide leadership with confidence in the company's financial foundation.
A balance sheet dashboard should track financial health and liquidity using these KPIs:
Liquidity ratios: Cash ratio, quick ratio, current ratio, and liquidity ratio to assess the company's ability to meet short-term obligations.
Efficiency ratios: Accounts receivable turnover and accounts payable turnover to understand how quickly the company collects cash and pays vendors.
Balance sheet components: Assets, liabilities and equity, tracking year-over-year growth to spot major shifts in structure.
Working capital: Total working capital and its components (receivables, inventory, payables) over time to identify trends and potential cash flow impacts.
Key balance sheet items: Critical line items like cash, accounts receivable, inventory, debt, and retained earnings with growth rates and absolute changes.
To visualize balance sheet data in a dashboard, you could use:
Scorecards showing key financial ratios with year-over-year growth rates
Detailed tables with hierarchical structure showing assets, liabilities, and equity with current year values, prior year growth and growth percentages
Bar charts to compare related metrics side by side, like AR turnover vs. AP turnover
Waterfall charts to show how working capital increases or decreases month by month
Conditional formatting to highlight important trends, like declining liquidity ratios or growing payables
Using Power BI’s AI and machine learning capabilities, you can build a predictive analytics dashboard to forecast future performance, automatically detect anomalies, and explain what's driving unusual patterns. That way, instead of manually analyzing trends, your finance team can spot issues before they escalate and understand the likely causes.
A predictive analytics dashboard built with Power BI embedded in Vena, showing a net income forecast with anomaly alerts and explanations around likely drivers.
This dashboard is a great tool for forecasting and helps answer three questions:
When is actual performance deviating significantly from what we'd expect?
What will our financial performance look like in future periods based on current trends?
What factors are most likely driving anomalies or forecast changes?
With these insights, Finance can shift from reactive reporting to proactive risk management, catching problems early and testing assumptions about future performance with data-driven predictions.
A predictive analytics dashboard should focus on forward-looking insights and anomaly detection. Some key opportunities for you to zero in on are:
Anomaly alerts: Automatically flag data points that fall outside expected ranges, showing the actual value, expected value and confidence intervals (the range in which that expected value is likely to fall) to help teams distinguish between normal variance and true outliers.
Predictive forecasts: Use machine learning models trained on historical data to project revenue, expenses, cash flow, or other key metrics, months or quarters into the future.
Forecast confidence: Show prediction intervals or confidence bands around forecasts, so teams understand the range of likely outcomes, not just a single point estimate.
Root cause drivers: Display the factors most strongly correlated with anomalies or forecast changes, ranked by statistical strength, so teams know where to investigate first.
Trend analysis: Compare actual performance against AI-generated predictions over time to assess forecast accuracy and refine models.
Some impactful visualizations to use in a predictive analytics dashboard are:
Time series charts with shaded confidence bands showing historical actuals and projected forecasts
Anomaly markers on trend lines that automatically highlight data points outside normal ranges, with tooltips explaining the deviation and expected values
Horizontal bar charts showing which variables most influence forecasts
Interactive sliders or what-if controls to adjust assumptions and instantly see the impact
To build your own Power BI dashboard, follow these steps:
Define your goal. Decide what business problem or decision the dashboard will support, such as tracking budget vs. actuals or monitoring profitability.
Identify the KPIs and metrics that matter most for that goal, like revenue growth rate, gross margin, or operating expenses.
Gather your data from different sources—Excel files, ERP systems, or databases and ensure it’s clean, consistent, and up to date.
Import your data into Power BI Desktop and use the “Model” view to link related tables, such as connecting department data to expense data.
Create calculated columns or measures using DAX formulas to standardize how you track KPIs, such as calculating variance or year-over-year growth.
Choose visuals that best explain your story. Use line charts for trends, bar charts for comparisons, pie charts for distribution, and scorecards for high-level KPIs.
Arrange visuals on your dashboard so the most important insights appear first, with key financial metrics at the top and supporting details below.
Add slicers and filters that allow users to drill into the data by time period, department, or region without creating new reports.
Connect your dashboard to live data or set up scheduled refreshes so reports update automatically.
Publish the dashboard to Power BI Service and set permissions, so each stakeholder only sees data relevant to them.
Share the dashboard with stakeholders, gather feedback, and refine based on how they actually use it to make insights clearer and more actionable.
Building a Power BI dashboard from scratch gives finance teams flexibility, but it also takes time to model data, maintain accuracy, and keep everything up to date.
If you already build dashboards in Power BI, Vena’s Power BI Connector lets you pull data directly from Vena into your existing reports. This keeps your dashboards synced with the latest budgets, forecasts, and actuals without manual updates.
You could also work directly in Vena, with Vena Insights. This lets your finance team create Power BI dashboards directly from your data already in Vena, and get access to pre-built dashboards for common use cases like operating expenses and revenue analysis.
Data flows automatically from your Vena models, eliminating manual exports and keeping everything up to date. It also makes sharing insights across the business easier, so leaders can access the information they need and make decisions faster.
For example, Canford Healthcare, which operates 11 senior care facilities across England, uses Vena Insights to track occupancy and profitability across its different customer segments. CFO Stephen Bates gave care home managers direct access to these dashboards so they could see performance data for their own locations.
This visibility made it easier for managers to make timely, informed decisions while freeing Finance from the manual work of distributing reports. It also improved accountability and operational decision-making across all 11 care homes.
Power BI gives finance teams powerful ways to visualize performance, uncover insights, and share data across the business. Pairing it with Vena makes these insights even more powerful.
With Vena’s connected platform, your budgets, forecasts, and actuals flow automatically into Power BI, ensuring every dashboard reflects real-time, reliable data. Finance teams can spend less time maintaining reports and more time analyzing trends, guiding strategy and supporting leadership with insights that drive action.
Discover how Vena and Power BI work together to take you from static data to story-driven insights that drive smarter decisions, in this self-guided product tour.
Learn how you can use Power BI to create insightful reports in this free course.
Start LearningJessica Tee Orika-Owunna is a content strategist and writer with over seven years of experience creating and repurposing relatable, helpful content for global brands including Contentsquare, Softr, Hotjar and Vena. She specializes in turning everyday product, user, and subject matter expert insights into product-led content that answers real buyer questions and supports better business outcomes.
