Monitoring your organization’s financial health, making budget calls, and optimizing cash flow management takes data—and lots of it. Without visibility of real-time metrics, you’re taking a shot in the dark and using company funds to do it.
That’s where a CFO dashboard comes in handy. These digital tools can be customized with all the metrics you need for a complete financial overview and strategic decision-making.
In this article, we show you what CFO dashboards are, their benefits, and how to customize your own for personalized financial visibility.
What Is a CFO Dashboard?
A CFO dashboard is a visual financial analysis tool that finance professionals use to gain insights into a company’s financial health. It consolidates important metrics like cash flow, revenue, and expenses in an easy-to-digest format, making for efficient tracking and monitoring. Using one makes it easy to get a high-level overview of your company’s financial health and performance trends.
CFO Dashboards vs CFO Reports: What’s The Difference?
It is normal to think that CFO dashboards and CFO reports are the same thing (it happens to most people—they sound very similar), but there are actually subtle differences between the two.
CFO Dashboard
They give you an up-to-date overview of your company’s finances at a glance, making it easy to grasp important data without much detail.
CFO Report
On the other hand, these are an in-depth analysis of financial trends, bottlenecks, and detailed breakdowns. They’re static and are used for long-term financial planning and reviews.
Both dashboards and reports are essential for a CFO's toolkit. The formers can alert you to issues and opportunities quickly, setting the stage for immediate action or further investigation. The latter helps for context and a thorough analysis to better understand bottlenecks.
What Finance Metrics Should a CFO Dashboard Include?
CFO dashboards are only as helpful as the metrics they include. Here are some of the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) for assessing your financial status:
- Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): Shows how much money your company earns regularly from subscriptions.
- Cost of Goods Sold (COGS): Tracks how much it costs to make your products or deliver your services.
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Shows how much you spend to get a new customer.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Measures the total revenue a customer will generate throughout their relationship with the company.
- Gross profit and net profit: Gross profit shows what’s left after you subtract the costs of making your product from what you earned. Net profit tracks the amount of money your organization is left with after you pay your expenses and taxation.
- Operating cash flow: Tracks the money your business makes from everyday activities.
- Burn rate: Shows how quickly a company is spending its money before it starts making a profit.
- Churn rate: Tracks how many customers cancel your service over time during a specific period of time.
Customize Your CFO Dashboard: Examples To Maximize Impact
You can select which metrics you want to appear depending on the information you need, the tasks you want to complete, and the decisions you need to make.
To customize yours:
- Identify what you want to monitor: What’s your main objective? Are you looking for better insights into marketing spend? In that case, you’ll need a CFO dashboard that displays KPIs like customer acquisition cost or customer lifetime value. Do you need to zoom in on liquidity? Then you’ll need metrics like operating cash.
- Find a relevant dashboard based on your needs: Different dashboards typically focus on different areas of spend. Cledara’s, for example, lets you monitor software spend across your organization.
- Select relevant KPIs and design the layout: Based on your objective, select and organize relevant KPIs for easy navigation and insights.
- Add visualizations: Use charts, graphs, and tables to get a better view of each metric.
- Refine and optimize: Periodically review functionality and data accuracy while making adjustments.
Let’s look at examples of five customized dashboards optimized for important financial workflows and processes.
Cost Per Customer Dashboard
A cost per customer dashboard typically provides CFOs with key performance indicators and data like:
- Customer acquisition cost
- The mean cost per customer
- The median cost per customer
- The most expensive customers over a given period
- Total customer acquisition spend over a given period
- Breakdown of features in most expensive customers over a given period
It also offers plenty of data visualization options to help identify your most expensive customers. With a dashboard like this, CFOs can track costs associated with supporting each of their customers to make CAC spend decisions, enable better contract negotiation, and plan pricing strategies more effectively.
Software Spend Dashboard
Software spend dashboards provide insights that help you monitor, manage, and optimize all your software-related expenses. Take Cledara, for example. With this dashboard, you have visibility on:
- Your expected spend
- Your available balance
- Your total spend for the month
- Upcoming invoices for applications in your tech stack
- A detailed spend analysis including a projected account balance
With these insights, your finance team can effectively manage software budgets, reduce unnecessary costs, and stay on top of upcoming invoices for software applications.
Subscription Analytics Dashboard
Want to know how many customers are leaving, converting, or signing up during a given period? Then, you need a subscription analytics dashboard.
These dashboards help CFOs see which customers are staying, leaving, or signing up by tracking:
- Churn
- Retention
- Acquisition
- Engagement
- Subscription revenue
Getting high-level insights from these KPIs helps CFOs decide the best place to allocate resources, prioritize developments, and optimize engagement.
Profit and Loss Dashboard
A profit and loss dashboard provides a real-time overview of your organization’s revenues, expenses, and profit. Typically, it consolidates multiple KPIs and data points like:
- Revenue
- Net sales
- Net profit
- Operating expense
- Margin trends across regions, customer segments, and product categories
Using a profit and loss dashboard helps CFOs decide how to improve profit margins, allocate resources across departments, and prioritize investments that drive revenue growth.
Cash Flow Dashboard
Cash flow dashboards track cash flow across various operations, providing insights into liquidity and potential financial risks.
Some of the KPIs of a typical cash flow dashboard are:
- Net cash flow
- Free cash flow
- Operating cash flows
- Cash conversion cycle
- Accounts receivable and payable
The metrics on cash flow dashboards help CFOs monitor company liquidity, optimize cash management, and decide on how to improve operational efficiency.
Benefits of Using a CFO Dashboard
The benefits of implementing a CFO dashboard for you, your finance team, and your entire organization include:
- Improved decision-making: Real-time data lets you make informed decisions quickly, enabling a faster response to shifting financial conditions, cash flow challenges, and any opportunities that may arise.
- Cost optimization: The KPIs that these dashboards report on help you identify expensive operations, unprofitable customers, or any other drain on your financial resources.
- Enhanced visibility: They provide visibility across all your financial activities and help you gain insight into finance, operations, and product team expenses for better collaboration between stakeholders.
- Automation and efficiency: Dashboards automatically update with your financial data, saving time and avoiding mistakes.
At Cledara, we’ve experienced the benefits of CFO dashboards first-hand. Christian Rasmussen, CFO, shares how he and the team have benefitted from implementing one:
“Our dashboard has enabled us to make proactive, data-driven decisions by providing clear visibility into essential metrics, such as subscription and interchange revenue, churn, customer acquisition costs and customer lifetime value. This clarity in real-time financial metrics allows us to allocate capital efficiently across the organisation, focusing on growth initiatives with the highest expected return on investment."
How Cledara’s Dashboard Can Help CFOs
CFO dashboards are crucial for finance teams looking to get high-level insights. Dashboards that monitor your software expenses help you stay within your budget, analyze spend, and find the best SaaS tools for your tech stack.
Cledara is a spend solution that can help you do just that.
With Cledara, you can monitor your payment status and account health through three different sections.
- The account balances feature shows you your total funds, how much you’ve dedicated to expenses, and the amount you have left.
- Wallet statistics give you insight into your expected spend based on previous spend data.
- Application and spend overview gives you a quick status report for your payments and applications.
The spend analysis section displays your projected account balance, and you can check your balance for the upcoming months. Cledara also analyzes your top spenders, the amount spent by each team member, and the amount spent on each application over the last 30 days.
Cledara makes getting high-level software spend insights quick, easy, and efficient. From spend breakdowns to capturing and matching invoices, it’s the solution you need to monitor your software spend and financial health.
