Chapter 2. QlikView Dashboard Financial KPIs

There are literally thousands of key performance indicators on http://www.kpilibrary.com. Many are the same, or very similar, formulas with different names, and every business concern's CEO and CFO have their own measure that helps them measure business performance in a way that is meaningful to them.

In this chapter, you will learn about the following concepts:

• What are key performance indicators (KPIs)?

  • Display sales as a KPI

  • Our first thermometer-type gauge

• What are the three most common financial KPIs?

  • How to create and display the KPIs: Return on Investment (ROI), Return on Assets (ROA) and Return on Expenses (ROE) in a QlikView dashboard

  • Set expressions

  • Gauge displays

• How to use QlikView to extend your revenue ratio reporting

  • List Box sheet objects vs charts

• Common size income statement

What are key performance indicators?

Key performance indicators, also known as KPIs, are measurements used to judge how well your business is doing. They lend themselves well to use in visual displays, such as graphs, thermometers, charts, and gauges used in dashboards. A visual of a KPI in a dashboard should not be complicated, should not require elaborate explanation, nor should it be redundant to the actual numeric information.

Dashboards should display key information in a quick-to-digest format. Often, gauges, dials, and thermometers are used incorrectly, causing confusion rather than clarification. If you want to know more than the recommendations in the dashboard analyses in this book, suggested reading about good dashboard design is Stephen Few's Information Dashboard Design.

If we display the current sales in the current month, we hope that it will show a rising number daily. But just a number by itself might be meaningless to most of us. Are sales going up at a faster rate than average...

Display sales as a KPI

In our previously loaded sample data from Chapter 1, Getting That Financial Data into QlikView, sales is a grouping in the AcctGroup column and is a credit. It comes directly from the source system as a negative so that, when everything is summed up, we get a trial balance. That is why we could see the out of balances in our first tab. Sales will have to be multiplied by minus one (-1) in order for it to appear as a positive number. Also, we would like to have a target number to compare with Sales.

Note

There are two additional sample data Excel spreadsheets available for download from your account at http://www.PacktPub.com that are used in this chapter. One is named Target.xls and the other is named IS3yr.xls.

Our target is another Excel workbook named Target.xls that is available for download, or you can create your own workbook to load. The one available for download has this data:

Common size income statement

My favorite KPI to implement in a dashboard is an extension of the Return on Sales ratio. This KPI or set of ratios is formally called Common size income statement but is often seen in an income statement as a percentage of Sales. I first came across this in an international business class on evaluating company profitability through financial statement analysis.

Note

There is an additional sample data Excel spreadsheet available for download from your account at http://www.PacktPub.com that is used in this chapter. Its name is IS3yr.xls.

Common size income statement lends itself particularly well to dashboards presented as a period-over-period line graph that allows you to see the shape and trend of the data, rather than just the numbers.

To create a common size income statement, start with the key subtotals of a standard income statement divided by total revenue. Here is an example of XYZ Company from an income statement template with a percentage of Sales column...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about key performance indicators and several different ways of creating visual displays of them in QlikView. We began creating set expressions and used expression shortcuts. We created three KPI gauges for Return on Investment, Return on Assets, and Return on Expenses. We created a common size income statement chart and did some analysis of that chart to see how visualization can be useful in data comparison.

In the next chapter, we will begin examining a QlikView example dashboard for a chief financial officer, where we will examine more KPIs and more QlikView objects to see how they are used in this dashboard.

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Company	Target
Cheyenne Manufacturing	140000000
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Cheyenne...

Common size income statement

My favorite KPI to implement in a dashboard is an extension of the Return on Sales ratio. This KPI or set of ratios is formally called Common size income statement but is often seen in an income statement as a percentage of Sales. I first came across this in an international business class on evaluating company profitability through financial statement analysis.

Note

There is an additional sample data Excel spreadsheet available for download from your account at http://www.PacktPub.com that is used in this chapter. Its name is IS3yr.xls.

Common size income statement lends itself particularly well to dashboards presented as a period-over-period line graph that allows you to see the shape and trend of the data, rather than just the numbers.

To create a common size income statement, start with the key subtotals of a standard income statement divided by total revenue. Here is an example of XYZ Company from an income statement template with a percentage of Sales column...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about key performance indicators and several different ways of creating visual displays of them in QlikView. We began creating set expressions and used expression shortcuts. We created three KPI gauges for Return on Investment, Return on Assets, and Return on Expenses. We created a common size income statement chart and did some analysis of that chart to see how visualization can be useful in data comparison.

In the next chapter, we will begin examining a QlikView example dashboard for a chief financial officer, where we will examine more KPIs and more QlikView objects to see how they are used in this dashboard.