How to design a Sales Dashboard in Microsoft Excel

Sales activity is the life blood for all businesses.  People who are responsible for sales must have their fingers on this vital pulse at all times.

Traditionally, managers read sales reports in tables of numbers.  Imagine if all the sales data is presented like below.  It summarizes 40 thousand sales records and presents the results all in a single dashboard. This dashboard shows:

• Sales information are divided by regions and placed side by side for Regional managers.
• Tiny sparklines show various historical sale trends and is compared with historical forecasts in blue for an entire year.
• Current sales performances are immediately compared with Sales KPI levels to judge performance levels.

The great thing about using dashboards is that sales results are communicated clearly and immediately.  It can align with the way people think and act so decisions can be made quicker!

A Sales Dashboard in Excel

Such dashboards are not difficult to build in Microsoft Excel.  Sales transaction can be extracted from the backend database systems and the numbers are simply plotted by Excel charts. Of course the analyst needs to follow certain dashboard design principles.

Learn more about Creating Dashboards in Excel.

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