Create a Financial Dashboard in 3 Steps
How to Create a Financial Dashboard
A financial dashboard is a comprehensive web-based platform designed to provide businesses with an efficient way to monitor and manage their financial performance and health.
It serves as a centralized hub where companies can oversee key financial metrics, track performance indicators, and improve communication with stakeholders and financial teams.
Essential Features for a Financial Dashboard
These are just some of the fundamental features to get started with building a financial dashboard.
One of the most critical features is user authentication and access control. A secure login system with multi-level access ensures that only authorized users can access specific parts of the dashboard. This includes the ability for administrators to create and manage user profiles, reset passwords, and update contact information.
The financial dashboard should also provide real-time access to essential metrics, such as revenue, expenses, profit margins, and cash flow.
Functionalities for financial monitoring, reporting, communication, and access to historical data are crucial.
Additionally, providing tools for analytics and reporting, such as financial trends, budget variances, and KPI tracking, is vital. Integration with other internal systems, like accounting software or ERP systems, can further enhance the dashboard’s usefulness.
Build or Buy Your Financial Dashboard
When it comes to implementing a financial dashboard, businesses face a crucial decision: should you build a custom solution or buy an off-the-shelf product?
If you build one using Five, you can develop exactly what you need without unnecessary bloat, tailored to your business’s specific requirements.
Building a financial dashboard allows you to connect to your existing IT infrastructure, serving as a single source of truth across all systems. It also ensures compatibility with legacy systems, working around the constraints of older software that may not be replaceable.
Having control over your data is paramount. This means keeping all internal information under your direct supervision.
Off-the-shelf financial dashboard solutions may not offer the same level of data privacy.
Building a secure financial dashboard becomes much simpler with Five. Five offers several advantages: it significantly speeds up the development process, requires no extensive coding knowledge, is more affordable than hiring a developer, and allows you to customize your financial dashboard to meet your specific needs.
In the long run, building a custom solution can be more cost-effective. Licensing fees for off-the-shelf financial dashboard solutions can add up quickly, with some costing thousands of dollars annually.
Creating a Financial Dashboard Can Be Easy
Building financial dashboards used to be a complex task requiring extensive coding knowledge.
Organizations often had to hire “expert developers,” which could lead to high costs and subpar results. Customizations were difficult, often requiring additional development work.
Fortunately, times have changed. Creating financial dashboards is now much easier with rapid portal builders like Five. These tools simplify the process, making it quicker and more accessible.
With Five, you can jump right in and have your financial dashboard built and running in a single afternoon. While there is still a learning curve, this approach is far more efficient than traditional methods.
With Five, you can:
- Set up your financial dashboard interface in minutes.
- Create a user-friendly, login-protected web interface for your financial dashboard.
- Easily import existing data, allowing you to get started quickly.
Get free access to Five and start building your financial dashboard today.
While we joke about “expert developers,” the Five team actually has a team of experts ready to assist you. So, if you ever feel like you’re in over your head, don’t worry, our expert developers are here to help you. And yes, we promise not to charge you an arm and a leg or leave you with a system that only we understand. To get a free consultation visit this page “Hire An Expert.”
How to Create a Financial Dashboard
Here’s how you can create a Financial Dashboard using Five, along with some prerequisites to consider.
Step 1: Access Five
If you haven’t already, sign up for free access to Five. Five offers a free trial for 14 days with no credit card required. Depending on your project’s complexity and data storage requirements, you may need a paid plan.
Step 2: List Out Financial Dashboard Attributes
Start by compiling a complete list of all attributes relevant to your Financial Dashboard. Consider what matters to your business: revenue tracking, expense monitoring, cash flow analysis, KPI tracking, etc.
Your financial dashboard should serve as a “single source of truth,” so ensure it’s as comprehensive as possible.
Here are some must-have attributes that are typically included in a financial dashboard:
- User authentication and access control
- Revenue and expense tracking
- Cash flow analysis
- Integration with accounting and ERP systems
- Reporting and analytics features
Follow our YouTube tutorial for a step-by-step guide, covering everything starting from database modeling.
The first step explains how to create a database table in Five. This quick four-and-a-half-minute video is highly recommended if your main goal is developing a financial dashboard.
The video also shows how to assign different SQL data types to your table fields and use Five’s database modeler to visualize your schema. Five automatically adds primary keys to all your tables, simplifying the setup process.
Financial Dashboard Design and User Experience with Five
Once you have defined your financial dashboard’s attributes and set up the database tables in Five, you can start focusing on the design and user experience.
Five allows you to create a highly intuitive and user-friendly interface for your financial dashboard, directly linked to the data stored in your tables.
User-Centric Design with Five: Five allows you to create a highly intuitive and user-friendly interface for your financial dashboard. It’s easy to design a clean layout, ensuring that users can navigate effortlessly. You can customize the UI to fit your business’s branding and user preferences.
Personalization Features: With Five, you can build personalized dashboards for each department or financial aspect. Users can easily add widgets or shortcuts to their most-used tools and resources, creating a more tailored and efficient user experience.
Built-In Search Functionality: Five offers robust search capabilities that can be easily integrated into your financial dashboard. Users can quickly locate financial records, budget reports, or transaction data by searching by column names or keywords, making navigation straightforward.
Mobile-Optimized Design: Five enables you to create a responsive financial dashboard that works on any device. This means users can access essential resources on the go, with a layout that adapts to different screen sizes for optimal usability.
Step 3: Launch Your Financial Dashboard Online
Once your financial dashboard’s database is ready and well-defined, you can begin populating it with the necessary data.
Using Five, you can easily upload CSV files directly into your SQL database. Simply ensure that the columns in your CSV align with the fields in your database, and import the data into your database tables.
Additionally, you can create a user-friendly, web-based database graphical user interface with Five. This interface can feature forms for adding or editing records, charts for visualizing data, and the ability to generate PDF reports using data from the database.
When you’re ready to deploy your Financial Dashboard, sign up for one of our paid plans, starting at just $29.99 per month per application. This plan includes unlimited end-users and provides you with a custom URL to access the Financial Dashboard online.
Conclusion: Building a Financial Dashboard
A well-designed financial dashboard is essential for any business looking to monitor and manage their financial performance effectively. With modern tools like Five, the process of creating a custom Financial Dashboard has become more accessible than ever.
Businesses no longer need to rely on expensive developers or settle for one-size-fits-all solutions. Instead, they can rapidly build and deploy a financial dashboard that truly serves their unique needs.
Get free access to Five and start building your financial dashboard today.
