Financial Performance Dashboard

Why I built it

Most finance teams hand stakeholders a raw P&L export. Leadership asks the same three questions every month — how did we do against budget, against last period, against last year — and answering them by hand is where the reporting week goes.

Questions it answers

• How did we perform against budget this month, and where did the variance come from?
• How does that compare to the prior period and the prior year?
• Which departments and cost types are driving operating spend?

How I built it

1. Power Query ETL. Eight human-readable monthly P&L grids get unpivoted into tidy tables and appended into single fact tables — repeatable on every refresh instead of re-pasted.
2. Star schema in Power Pivot. Two fact tables, actuals and budget, related to date, account and department lookups — the same modeling discipline as a warehouse, inside a workbook.
3. DAX time intelligence. Current month, trailing 3, 6 and 12, and YTD measures with matched prior-period and prior-year comparisons, driven by a SWITCH-based period selector.
4. Presentation layer isolation. The dashboard reads only from measures, never the raw tabs, so changing the source data never breaks the report.
5. CFO-style write-up. Variances translated into findings and prioritised recommendations in a companion memo.

What it surfaces

• Revenue on plan but margin off plan: revenue landed within about 1% of budget and grew 12% year over year, while gross margin compressed roughly 15 points — locating the problem in cost of goods, not sales.
• Cost discipline cushioned the result: operating expenses came in 24% under budget, turning a budgeted EBITDA loss of $(159k) into $(54k).
• One line ran hot: professional fees was the only over-budget category at +40% against under-spend everywhere else — exactly the exception a dashboard should flag.