I've been doing research for about a week now, looking for a very basic answer to the question : How do you write a P&L or Balance Sheet in Tableau?
So far, all of the answers I have found are "you don't need financial statements, you need analytics" and then the answer goes in a different direction.
That's all well and good but if I can't show a P&L and Balance Sheet that ties out to our statutory financials, I'm never going to get my audience to buy in on anything else.
So I'll ask again, what are the best ways to create financial statements with Tableau? In my case I have all the data loaded and tied out in prep - I just cant quite figure out how to lay it out in a format that looks like a financial statement.
Hi Jason,
I think I'm speaking with a time-traveling version of me. I've literally had this same exact situation for my current employer. My job was to implement Tableau across the company. The very first thing I was told needed to be done before everything else, was to build a Tableau version of our 3 financial statements. I was not thrilled about this. That is definitely not what Tableau was built for, although it can be done... This was, like you mentioned, what I had to do to get their "buy-in" to continue to do more particularly useful things with Tableau for the business.
That being said, the structure of your data is supremely important. Like, you seriously need to make sure it's future-proof and hopefully lock it down in a database. I'm assuming you have something like an export of your trial balance as your data source. Luckily for me, I had someone to help me build out a PostgreSQL database to house this financial data. He was able to add some classifications like the different levels of hierarchies (i.e. - line (Operating Expenses), activity description (SG&A), account description (Meals & Entertainment)), in addition to some script that adds in things like YTD and variance values, which you would need for a YTD P&L. Every GL account needs to have a record (even if it's zero), for every division or department you have (not sure how large your company is). I've attached some dummy data so you can see how I've structured mine if you find it to be useful. This works for the P&L and Balance sheet. The Statement of Cash Flows turned out to be wayyy more complicated.
When you put together the P&L, you need to do a few things. First, you have to figure out which "chunks" come from your trial balance, and which chunks need to come from calculations (i.e. - gross profit, margins, etc.) Then you need to build out all of your calculations. Start from the top of the P&L and work your way down. the reason for this is that some of the calcs on the bottom of the P&L are reliant on previous calcs, so you can just layer in your previous calcs, like EBITDA for instance. Then you need to build out a viz for each individual "chunk" of data. You will need to build out a modular grid made of a bunch of containers and vizzes, so each section needs its own viz. Once you have all your individual vizzes built out, then you can start putting your dashboard together and the rest should be pretty easy from there with some minor formatting if necessary.
This project was not easy or straightforward, but I am living proof that it can be done lol. If you need more detailed shop talk, shoot me a message. 😁
Hope this helps!
-Graham
