Introduction
Financial projections are an essential part of the business management process, helping a company or organization to develop strategies, make plans, plan its operations or understand the performance of a business. Visualizing financial projections can be a powerful tool in making these decisions and understanding the financial situation of a business.
The main benefits of visualizing financial projections include:
- It can help a business better identify its overall financial health
- It can aid in making sound financial decisions and identifying risks
- It can help to measure and compare performance easily over time
- It can aid in identifying potential opportunities
There are many ways to visualize financial projections, and they can all be used together to enhance understanding and make the most of the data. In this blog post, we will explore the different ways you can visualize financial projections to gain insight into your business’s financial situation.
What Is Financial Projection Visualization?
Financial projection visualization is a tool to make it easier to analyze complex financial data. It involves taking a set of data, typically from a financial projection model, and creating a visual representation of it. Visualization can be used for both forecasting and decision-making. It can help reduce the amount of time needed to understand the data and make better informed decisions.
Definition of Financial Projection Visualization
Financial projection visualization is the process of creating an interactive visual representation of financial projections. This can be done either in spreadsheets or with specialized software, depending on the complexity of the data. Financial projection visualization offers an easy way to view financial data in an intuitive manner, enabling informed decisions to be made more quickly and easily.
Why It's Important
Financial projection visualization is an invaluable tool for anyone who works with financial data. By making it easier to make sense of the data, it provides insight into the trends and patterns that lie beneath the surface. It helps to uncover problems and opportunities that would otherwise remain hidden. Using visualization, a business can quickly identify areas that need improvement and make better informed decisions.
Financial projection visualization can also be used to compare different scenarios and create more accurate forecasts. By eliminating the need for manual calculations and analysis, it can save time and improve efficiency. In addition, visualizing data often makes it easier to communicate complex financial topics, boosting understanding.
In short, financial projection visualization is a useful tool that can help businesses better understand and make use of their financial data. It can lead to more informed decisions and help to uncover hidden opportunities and issues.
Traditional Tools
When it comes to visualizing financial projections, there are two traditional tools that are most commonly used: spreadsheets and graphs. Both formats can be used to bring the complex data to life and make it easier for investors to read and understand.
Spreadsheets
Spreadsheets are the most common form of financial visualisation as they are quick to set up and easy to use. With spreadsheets, a company can showcase complicated financial data in one place, with the data being broken down into manageable chunks. The cells and rows make it easier to compare different financial performance scenarios, enabling companies to track their progress and compare predictions against actual figures.
Graphs
When it comes to displaying financial projections in a visual format, graphs are the most popular choice. Graphs can show data in the form of charts, illustrating more easily how the figures move over a period of time. It is a powerful tool for understanding trends and seeing how different variables affect each other. Graphs can also provide a quick overview, as investors can quickly get a snapshot of the company's financial performance.
Overall, traditional tools such as spreadsheets and graphs provide a simple way of visualising financial projections. These tools make it easier for investors to quickly understand the data, enabling them to make more informed decisions about the company's performance.
Web Platforms
When needing to visualize financial projections, web platforms provide an easy and effective tool to view financial data. Web platforms vary in complexity, specificaly when it comes to how budgets, ROIs, and other financial measures are presented to stakeholders. In this section, two types of internet-solutions are detailed to help visualizing financial projections.
Cloud Solutions
Cloud-based solutions offer an easier, turn-key solution and are therefore the go-to options for those looking to quickly visualize financial data. These solutions are usually pre-packaged software, typically sold on a subscription-basis, that enable budgeting, tracking performance metrics as well as direct forecasting functionality.
Custom Solutions
Building custom solutions may involve more effort on the user’s end, but allow them to curate the user experience in a manner that is more tailored to their organization’s specific needs. The comprehensive custom solutions provide a flexible dataset, which not only enables business leaders to visualize financial projections in a more creative manner, but also to customize certain parameters for a more in-depth analysis of financial data.
End-of-Day Reporting
End-of-day reporting allows accountants and financial analysts to gain insights into the performance of a business across different time periods. This type of reporting utilizes key performance indicators (KPIs) and various other visual methods to help review the accuracy and relevance of the financial projections.
Use of KPIs
KPIs are a vital part of end-of-day reporting, and provide a snapshot of how a company is performing at any given time. The most common KPIs include, but are not limited to, revenue, profit, customer retention, customer acquisition, and employee satisfaction. These KPIs are then used in conjunction with financial projections to measure the accuracy and relevance of the projections.
Examples of Dashboard Visuals
Dashboards are a powerful tool when it comes to visualizing financial projections. Dashboards can be used to securely display and analyze financial information in real-time, giving accountants and financial analysts a comprehensive overview of their data. Examples of dashboard visuals include scatter plots, line graphs, and bar graphs.
- Scatter plots can be used to compare two variables and look for correlations.
- Line graphs are commonly used to chart the trend of data over time.
- Bar graphs provide a visual representation of data and can be used to compare items.
Mobile Accessibility
The ability to access your financial projections from anywhere, on any device, can be incredibly beneficial for keeping your records up to date. There are different solutions available to access financial information from the web, either through a desktop or web-based application, or with a mobile application for smartphones and tablets.
Advantages of Having Access on the Go
Taking your financial projections mobile offers several advantages. By having access on the go, you can:
- Check up on your financial progress in real-time
- Make changes to projections quickly and easily
- Share projections with others in a concise format
- Make informed decisions with current data
- Stay informed on the go
Overview of Mobile Financial Projection Visualization Solutions
In order to achieve a mobile financial projection visualization solution, you can use a fully mobile-friendly web application, an iOS or Android app that can be downloaded, or a combination of both. Fully mobile-friendly web applications take advantage of the smaller screen sizes of mobile devices, and allow for direct interaction with the software without any downloads necessary. iOS and Android apps, on the other hand must be downloaded from the respective app store, but offer a great amount of flexibility and the ability to customize the look and feel of the app. Depending on your needs and budget, either option can offer a great way to take your financial projections mobile.
Conclusion
Data and visuals often go hand in hand, so being able to visualize financial projections can be an invaluable asset for a business. There are a variety of tools available that can help a business visualize financial projections, each of which has advantages and disadvantages depending on the particular needs of the project.
Summary of the different visualization solutions
The most popular visualization tools for financial projections include Microsoft Excel, Tableau, Power BI, Qlik, Domo, and Google Data Studio. Each of these offers different features and capabilities for creating visualizations, including the ability to create custom visuals, manipulate and transform data, access a range of visualizations, and much more.
Encouragement to pick the right tool for the job
It is important to choose the right tool for the job when visualizing financial projections. Choosing a tool that is not optimized for the task could lead to wasted time and effort, and potentially a poorly-visualized projection. Businesses should evaluate their needs and which tools can best meet them, taking into account their budget, the available skill set, and the type of financial projection that needs to be made.
- Microsoft Excel: Spreadsheet software for simple to complex data manipulation, transformation and visualizations.
- Tableau: A powerful data visualization tool for creating visuals from data, interactive dashboards and more.
- Power BI: Microsoft Business Intelligence tool for collecting, analyzing and sharing data.
- Qlik: Intuitive BI solution for creating and analyzing data.
- Domo: All-in-one analytics platform for collecting, manipulating and transforming data.
- Google Data Studio: Cloud-based data visualization tool for creating dynamic visuals.
In conclusion, there are many tools available to visualize financial projections and businesses should carefully consider their needs and which tool will best meet them. By taking the time to evaluate their options, businesses can select the right visualization tool for the task at hand and be confident that their financial projections will be accurately and effectively visualized.