A CFO dashboard that puts cash, revenue, spend and margin in one view

What does a CFO dashboard in Data Studio show?

It shows the handful of numbers a finance leader checks first, laid out so that nothing needs re-calculating in a spreadsheet. The top row covers cash, revenue, spend and margin for the month and year to date, with the prior period and budget beside each.

Underneath, separate pages handle the detail finance teams are asked about most often in board and leadership meetings.

• Cash: opening and closing balance by bank account, inflows and outflows, and a simple runway figure.
• Revenue: by customer, product line, region and entity, against budget.
• Spend: by category, vendor and cost center, with month-on-month change.
• Margin: gross and contribution margin by product line or business unit.
• AR and AP ageing: balances in 0 to 30, 31 to 60, 61 to 90 and 90+ day buckets, by customer and vendor.
• Budget vs actual: variance in value and percent, with a commentary field for finance to explain the gaps.

Which accounting systems can the dashboard read from?

Most can, through exports even when no direct connector exists. We work with data from Xero, QuickBooks, Zoho Books, Tally and NetSuite, plus the Google Sheets most finance teams keep for budgets, headcount and adjustments.

For smaller setups, a scheduled export lands in Google Drive and is mapped into a structured Sheet with business rules applied, such as chart-of-accounts grouping and intercompany eliminations. For larger or multi-entity companies, the same exports load into BigQuery, where scheduled queries build the trial balance, ageing and budget tables each time new data arrives. A partner connector can replace the export step where one exists for your system.

How do you map a chart of accounts for reporting?

We build a mapping table that assigns every ledger account to a reporting line, once, and every chart reads through it. That table is the single most important piece of a finance dashboard.

Accounting systems are organized for bookkeeping, not for leadership questions. A mapping sheet groups accounts into revenue streams, cost of sales, operating expense categories and below-the-line items, and handles the accounts that move between categories over time. Finance owns the sheet, so when a new account is created they add one row and the dashboard follows. It also means two entities on different charts of accounts can roll up into one consolidated view.

Who sees what? Access control for finance data

Finance data needs tighter sharing than marketing data, and we set it up that way from the start. Report access is granted to named people or groups, never by public link, and sources that hold payroll or customer-level margin sit on separate pages or reports with narrower access.

Where different viewers should see different rows, such as a regional head seeing only their entity, we use viewer's credentials on a BigQuery source with row-level rules, or a filter by email address. On Data Studio Pro, reports live in team workspaces tied to a Google Cloud project, so they belong to the company and survive staff changes, and audit logging records who accessed what.

How often should a CFO dashboard refresh?

It should refresh when the books are ready, which for most companies is month-end close. Showing a half-closed month next to a fully closed one invites wrong conclusions, so we add a close status flag and show the latest closed period by default.

Cash and receivables can refresh more often, daily or weekly, because bank and invoice data is useful before the close. The dashboard labels each section with the date its data was last loaded, so nobody confuses a provisional figure with a final one. Scheduled email delivery can send the closed-month pack to leadership automatically.

Which companies is this finance dashboard built for?

It is built for mid-size private companies where the finance leader is also the person producing the numbers. Typically there is a CFO or finance head, a small team, one or more entities, and a monthly pack that takes days to assemble from exports and spreadsheets.

It suits companies that want clear visibility without a large BI programme. If you already run an enterprise BI platform with a data team, you probably do not need us for this.

What changes for the finance team after launch?

The monthly pack stops being a build and becomes a review. Instead of exporting, pasting and checking formulas for two or three days after close, the team confirms the data has loaded, reads the variances and writes commentary.

Questions from leadership change too. When a director can filter revenue by customer or spend by vendor themselves, fewer ad hoc requests reach finance, and the ones that do are sharper. The account mapping sheet becomes a living document that finance owns, and a short runbook explains what to do if an export fails or a new entity is added.

We test this before handover by running one full month-end with your team: they load the data, we watch, and anything unclear goes into the runbook.