Must-have analytics for revenue reporting in Tableau

What analytics should I create for my revenue data? Lets discuss the basics of it. Using Tableau sky is the limit, but there are few fundamental types of analyses that MUST be created when working with revenue data. Obviously the availability and level of detail of the data can dictate whether each one of those analyses be a simple viz or dashboards themselves with lots of additional detail. Failure to provide those analyses by one from or another with Tableau mean total failure of the BI function.

To illustrate what is the bare minimum of revenue analyses I will use simulated revenue data for clothing store in South Africa. More matured corporations will have more complex revenue data, but in the end this is what the analyses should look like in the end.

What the business leadership needs to know about revenue?

Most likely you are using Tableau/Power BI to provide high-level, high-visibility reporting to senior management on company’s revenue. The benefits are clear – proper utilization of data infrastructure (data lake, tableau server etc.) will provide automation and efficiency (financial analyst won’t have to do it by hand using manual excels…). So the question is what is the main thing the senior management wants to know about revenue:

• Do we have enough of it? – what are the number, this is why corporations exist after all;

• Are we forecasting/budgeting correctly? – everything starts with revenue, so proper forecasting is essential;

• In what direction are we going? – are we trending okay or  we are in negative spiral?

• Which are the biggest drivers? – which products/customers are driving the revenue numbers;

So based on this we can create several must-have charts in Tableau. Here we will show 5 examples. Think of them as types of analysis, because with creativity and Tableau you can create various different forms of representation, but in the end of the day you must be addressing the questions that these charts are addressing. I picked the simplest ones just exact to convey the idea behind the analysis:

Revenue & Volume Trend

In revenue space everything starts with trends. The most important question when it comes to revenue remains - are we trending in right direction because if not we need to take action. This is why every revenue analysis must start with simple trend chart. Like this:

It is a simple barchart for last 12M revenue to highlight trends. Also in this particular case we have overlapped the volumes trend because for such a clothing store as in the example the main revenue driver is the volume of units sold.

Now this chart is easily build with other tools, there is nothing special about it, but this is the baseline and must be covered.

Growth Trend

Similarly to the trend we also must present the growth as well. It gives another angle into analyzing the trend of revenue. Now there are a lot of different growth metric. In our example we have chosen Month-On-Month growth:

Others versions might include YTD (Year-to-date) growth, or quarterly growths, it really depends on the specific case. But the main idea is to show the percentage change vs some prior period. Also absolutely necessary is to color-code the results, in Tableau this is done dynamically and very easy.

Again this is a very basic chart but absolute must when it comes to revenue reporting.

Dynamic Breakdown of revenue

Your dashboard must have the functionality to show the revenue (and variances) by different important dimension. Senior managers care about seeing the revenue by product, also at the same time by segment, site etc. Tableau has very good functionalities when it comes to that. Check this example:

This is basic dual-barchart focused on latest month of data. First section shows the revenue number, while the second is the growth vs the previous month. The whole chart is controlled by a simple drop-down allowing user to see the breakdown by all the important dimensions.

Such a functionality is a must-have when it comes to revenue reporting, as it is very very important to be able to slice the revenue data by different segmentation.

Drill down to top 10 customers/products

 Some of the dimensions used in revenue reporting are not really suitable to be put on a bar chart because they have a lot of members. Companies have hundreds of products and thousands of clients. That's why we must have the functionality to show Top clients/products. See this solution:

Bottom barcharts are Top10 by product and customer. Using Tableau functionality we actually can see these Top 10 by each of the dimension we previously used e.g. clicking "Jeans" category on the above chart we see the Top 10 products and customers. Additionally that action impact the left side as well - user can see the trend of this "Jeans" category and the growth M-o-M.

This is what makes Tableau so useful, so using these functionalities in revenue reporting is absolutely necessary.

Everyone can create simple line chart in excel to show the revenue, but utilizing Tableau senior managers can receive much more efficient analysis. Drilling, filtering, switching on the most important revenue dimension brings this analysis. This is how Tableau must be used in revenue space.