A one-click FP&A reporting dashboard built in Excel with Power Query, Power Pivot, and DAX. Change a single date cell, hit Refresh All, and every KPI, variance, and chart updates — Revenue, Gross Profit, and EBITDA against budget, prior period, and prior year, with operating spend broken down by department and cost type.
Most finance teams hand stakeholders a raw P&L export. This project turns that same data into an interactive executive dashboard that answers the three questions leadership actually asks every month — How did we do versus budget? Versus last period? Versus last year? — and lets the user re-slice the whole view from a single input cell.
| Area | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Data modeling | A star-schema in the Power Pivot data model: two fact tables (actuals + budget) related to date, account, and department lookup tables. |
| ETL / data wrangling | Power Query unpivots eight human-readable monthly grids into tidy tables and appends them into single fact tables — repeatable on refresh. |
| DAX & time intelligence | Period measures (current month, trailing 3 / 6 / 12, YTD) with matched prior-period and prior-year comparisons, driven by a SWITCH-based selector. |
| FP&A / financial analysis | Budget-vs-Actual variance analysis, gross-margin bridges, and operating-expense decomposition by department and cost type. |
| Dashboard design | KPI tiles, conditional green/red donut gauges, and slicer-driven interactivity — one click re-points the entire report. |
| Business storytelling | Translating variances into CFO-level findings and prioritized recommendations (see the companion documentation). |
From the included sample dataset (trailing 12 months) — illustrative of the read-outs the dashboard produces:
- Revenue on plan, margin off plan. Revenue landed within ~1% of budget and grew +12% YoY, yet gross margin compressed ~15 points — isolating the problem to cost of goods, not sales.
-
Cost discipline cushioned the loss. 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 (+40%) against universal under-spend elsewhere — exactly the kind of exception a dashboard should flag.
The Dashboard reads only from the measures — never the raw tabs — so the presentation layer stays insulated from the underlying data. The single Current Month input cell drives every reporting window.
Full build, architecture, and maintenance guide: docs/TECHNICAL.md
CFO-style findings & recommendations memo: Financial_Performance_Dashboard_Documentation.pdf
| File | Purpose |
|---|---|
Financial_Performance_Dashboard.xlsx |
The workbook — model, data model, and dashboard. |
README.md |
This overview. |
docs/TECHNICAL.md |
Deep-dive documentation (architecture, data model, measures, usage). |
Financial_Performance_Dashboard_Documentation.pdf |
Formatted documentation + findings memo (previews in-browser on GitHub). |
LICENSE |
MIT license. |
- Requires Microsoft Excel on Windows or Microsoft 365 (Power Pivot is needed; it is not available on Excel for Mac).
- Open
Financial_Performance_Dashboard.xlsx, change theCurrent Monthcell on theListsheet, and choose a window on the Period slicer. Use Data → Refresh All after editing data.
This dashboard was built as a hands-on FP&A and Excel data-modeling exercise, following a step-by-step tutorial on the Power Query → Power Pivot → DAX workflow. I rebuilt it end to end to understand each layer — the ETL, the relationships, the time-intelligence measures, and the variance logic — and I'm happy to walk through any part of how it works.
Released under the MIT License — free to use, modify, and distribute with attribution. Set the copyright holder in LICENSE before publishing.
The included figures are driver-generated sample data, not audited financials. Validate assumptions and load your own data before relying on outputs for decisions.