Even More Enhancements to the Dashboard
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Editor’s note: Since publication of this update, our Scoreboard feature has undergone a change, and we now call it the Dashboard.
We’re keeping busy with a few new enhancements to the Dashboard data views to make it easier to compare your financial performance to your budgets and forecasts.
New bar charts
When you’re reviewing your sales or your expenses, it’s useful to see a visual breakdown of the numbers so you can easily see how one line of sales, or one expense, is doing compared to another one.
So, we’ve added some cool, new bar charts to the LivePlan Dashboard so you can easily get a visual overview of these numbers. Even better, if you hover your mouse over an individual bar, the bar will expand to show how that item did compared to your forecast, the same period last year, as well as the previous period. Check it out:
New sorting available for data tables
You might not have known this, but data tables in the Dashboard can be sorted so that you can see your data from largest to smallest, or smallest to largest. Just click any column header to sort by that column. We’ve actually had this feature in the Dashboard for a few months, but had neglected to talk about it, so here’s a quick video showing how you can sort your data:
Sorting by percentage change can be a great way to see which expenses or which revenue streams have changed the most so you can keep an eye on the biggest changes in your business.
But, sometimes percentage changes can be misleading. Suppose you have a normal $100 monthly expense that increases to $200 one month. That’s a 100% increase! But, maybe that change really isn’t that important if most of your other expenses are thousands of dollars. A much smaller percentage change, say 10%, in a $5,000 monthly expense would be a much bigger absolute change – $500. Maybe you should be keeping more of an eye on that expense even though it only changed by 10% instead of the much smaller expense that changed by 100%.
To help you see these types of changes, the Dashboard now lets you view and sort your data by absolute change in addition to percentage change. Just click the toggle at the bottom of any table and you can see the new sorting feature in action:
And several other smaller changes to make your life easier
In addition to the new enhancements above, we also made a few additional changes to make it easier to see what time period you are viewing and reduce confusion when you are looking at a full year’s worth of data.
If you’re looking at a full year’s worth of data, “previous period” and “previous year” were the same thing. So, we’ve removed the “previous period” data sets in these cases and only show “previous year” data. This gives you a cleaner view of your data and removes some repetition.
We’ve also added specific dates to the date selector drop down so you can see exactly what time period will be selected when you choose “last quarter,” for example.
Finally, when you hover over charts, there are often pop-ups that show additional detail data for that chart. We now show you exactly what month and year you are looking at.
Hopefully you’ll find these updates useful. Let us know in the comments what you think and how we can continue to improve LivePlan and the Dashboard.
