How to Build a Financial Dashboard For Your Company

Sales data defines everything about your company. They affect everything from your company’s near-term strategy to expansion plans years down the line. They let you know when to hire more people, or to streamline resources instead. 

One product’s decreasing sales might point to the need for a redesign. Another’s drop might point to seasonal trends—hinting when you should restock and how much potential growth that product has this holiday season. Growing returns could point to product issues. Increasing sales could mean additional inventory will be needed more quickly.

Those sales insights are valuable to your entire team. Sometimes, they might even be the most obvious to those closest to your products—not the finance team with access to your Stripe and Shopify analytics. You instead need a financial dashboard that shares sales stats and trends with everyone in your company who can benefit from the data.

And this can be done easily using a digital signage software like ScreenCloud. It can show your live and historic sales and finance data on office TVs that can be viewed by your entire team. Here’s how to build one.

The Metrics to include on a financial dashboard

Sometimes, a single chart is a better motivator than hours of team meetings. Putting it up on the TV means everyone can see it at a glance, whenever they look up from their work.

Other times, more detailed analysis is needed. Some teams might want real-time sales data, to kick off tasks as each order comes in. Others may want granular details around average payment processing fees, returns, and more. Those might be better served by a detailed dashboard showing multiple finance stats together.

That’s all possible on a ScreenCloud-powered TV, plus integrations with your company’s financial data.

Before you start building, though, define your objectives. What’s the most important goal for your team? Then, pull together the integrations, data, and graphs into a dashboard that will give your team those insights.

Need real-time insights into today’s orders and returns? You’ll want API and Webhook-powered data, perhaps as a ticker under your signage to show real-time data.

Working towards shared goals, tracking how financial data impacts your KPIs and OKRs? Charts and graphs with a long-term view might be more valuable—something you can build with ScreenCloud’s Dashboards tool, with data-focused platforms like Klipfolio, Google Looker Studio, and even Excel and Google Sheets.

Want to improve communications around your company’s data? Pair graphs and real-time data with analysis around the data to spark discussions and change.

With the goal in mind, you can then plan out what financial data to put on your signage. Pick from the raw data—sales, expenses, fees, returns, assets, liabilities, and more—then choose to show new data as it comes in or combine it into broader takeaways—total sales numbers, graphs of sales over time, comparisons of one product’s sales over another, and so on.

How to integrate finance apps with ScreenCloud

Now that you know what data you need to share with your team, think through where that data lives. Sales might be recorded in Stripe, PayPal, Braintree, or Square. Order info may be in Shopify, Etsy, or an Amazon vendor dashboard. Profit and loss details could be in accounting software like QuickBooks or Xero.

Then, think about how to get that data on your screen.

ScreenCloud’s digital signage software is built around software integrations that make it easy to pull in data from the software you already use and put it on the big screen. You can put any number on your screens, with four core ways to pull data from your financial apps into Screencloud:

• Built-in ScreenCloud integrations, with ScreenCloud apps to pull your company data from Excel, Google Sheets, Microsoft Power Bi, and more onto your signage.
• Embeds, to show shared data from your apps via embed codes
• ScreenCloud Playgrounds, to build custom slides and dashboards updated automatically via Webhooks for real-time reports, or to graph data with Chart.js (which is how the dashboard at the opening of the article was built)
• ScreenCloud Dashboards, to scrape graphs and charts from your software directly

Read More: How to Create a Digital Sales Board

While most finance and accounting software doesn’t directly integrate with ScreenCloud, and security requirements often make it difficult to directly connect via Dashboards, there’s always a workaround you can use to build a data dashboard.

Typically, the best option is to connect your finance software with automation tools like Zapier, Make or IFTTT to send every new sale or payment to another tool like Google Sheets, Airtable, or Looker Studio, then connect that app to ScreenCloud. Or, use the automation tool to push the data via webhooks to a ScreenCloud Playground dashboard.

Here’s how it works:

How to connect Stripe to ScreenCloud with Google Sheets and Looker Studio

Stripe’s payment processing tools make it easy to start selling products and services online. And its deep integrations mean you can take your data with you whenever you need.

Stripe doesn’t have native ScreenCloud integrations, nor does it work with Dashboards. Instead, you can use API and 3rd party integrations to pull out Stripe data, graph it, then send those graphs to your office TV.

One option is with Supermetrics, a Google Sheets add-on that can sync your Stripe data to a spreadsheet where you can then graph it in a Google Looker Studio dashboard. Connect your Stripe account, select the data you want to sync (orders, location, processing fees, and more), and moments later you’ll see the tabulated data ready to sort and graph.

Or, using app automation platform Zapier, you could send every new order from Stripe to Google Sheets, and use Zapier Transfer to copy historic data over as well.

Selling subscriptions with Stripe? You could also use Geckoboard to build a dashboard with subscriber data—including number of trialists, subscribers, and more—to supplement your sales and finance data.

Learn more about using integrations in our How to Build a Stripe Sales Tracker guide.

How to connect Square to ScreenCloud with API and Webhooks

Square’s in-person payments let you accept credit cards in your real-word store with an affordable credit card reader. 

It has fewer integrations than Stripe, but Square makes up for that with deep webhooks support and an accessible API. Those both require a bit more developer skills than Stripe’s no-code integrations, but still make it fairly easy to turn Square payment data into a dashboard.

Webhooks—notifications sent from one app to another—are the easiest to work with. You can set Square to push webhook notifications directly to a ScreenCloud Playground dashboard for a scrolling ticker tape. Or, you can have Square send every payment’s details to an Airtable database, where you can build sales graphs and highlight important payment info, then showcase that on your ScreenCloud screens via Airtable’s embed codes.

And if that’s too difficult, you can instead export a CSV spreadsheet from Stripe, import it into Excel or Google Sheets, then use that to build historic graphs. It won’t be real-time, but it will keep your team updated on your company’s finances.

Learn more about using Webhooks and API calls in our Turn Square Payments & Orders Into a Digital Signage Dashboard guide.

How to connect QuickBooks, Xero, and FreshBooks to ScreenCloud with Klipfolio

Already have your financial data in an accounting app like QuickBooks, Xero, or FreshBooks? Those tools have already turned your raw sales figures into actionable data. They also integrate with dashboard-building tool Klipfolio, making it incredibly easy to bring your data and graphs over to your ScreenCloud signage.

Start out by connecting your accounting app to Klipfolio. Select the pre-built Klips, or widgets, for your app, perhaps listing total sales, graphing historic sales figures, and more. Or, use the raw data from your accounting tool to build new visualizations in Klipfolio, similar to how you’d build graphs in Google Looker Studio. Finally, with your most important data together, pull all of the widgets together into a single dashboard—and in your dashboard’s sharing options, choose to publish a link to your dashboard.

Now, open ScreenCloud’s Links tab in the left sidebar, add a new link, and paste your Klipfolio dashboard. Moments later, you’ll have your accounting data shared live on your company’s TVs.

Learn more in our guide to building Klipfolio dashboards for digital signage.

How to connect PayPal, Braintree, Amazon Seller Center, and any other finance app to ScreenCloud

At least one of the options above should work for almost any other finance app you use.

First, integrations. Check ScreenCloud Apps for an integration with your financial tool. If it doesn’t have one, check Klipfolio or Geckoboard for built-in integrations you can use. You can also test ScreenCloud Dashboards, to see if it can pull in your app’s built-in financial graphs (though that doesn’t work with most financial apps due to security requirements).

Then, automations. Check Zapier, Microsoft Power Automate, IFTTT, and Make’s integrations libraries to see if they work with your financial app. They likely do; Zapier, for instance, supports PayPal, Braintree, Amazon Seller Center, and dozens of other financial and accounting apps. Connect your app, then have the automation tool save the data to a Google Sheets or Excel spreadsheet. Then build graphs and reports, and add them to ScreenCloud’s respective spreadsheet apps (such as the Google Sheets app in the screenshot above).

Finally, code. When the first two don’t work, see if your app includes Webhooks support (like Square) or an API. If so, you can use ScreenCloud Playgrounds to build an auto-updating dashboard powered by Webhooks data. It’s a bit more work, but ChatGPT can help you code it in a few minutes.

How to pull together financial data into a ScreenCloud dashboard

Now that you’ve got all of your financial data connected to ScreenCloud, it’s time to pull it all together.

One option is to show a single chart, graph, or data point at a time. To do that, add your finance apps to a ScreenCloud playlist, so they’ll play full-screen in sequence with the other apps and slides you’ve added to your screens. That’s best for a single graph from Google Sheets, or a pre-built dashboard from Klipfolio, Geckoboard, or Looker Studio.

Or, build a multi-widget dashboard with ScreenCloud to show multiple takeaways at once. Open your Channels tab, add a new channel, and select a multi-app layout from the options on the right. Then, add one app after another to each of your sections, and experiment with what looks best. A Playgrounds screen with a single line of text works well in a news ticker along the bottom. Larger graphs work better in the core sections of your screen.

Then get creative. Want to help your team figure out what the numbers mean? You could mashup Zapier integrations, ChatGPT, ScreenCloud Playgrounds, and GraphQL to chart your sales data and tell your team what to make of it. It could highlight outliers such as unusually high payment processing fees or especially strong sales dates, helping your team learn from the data even if they don’t have time to carefully watch your financial graphs.

That’s also the best way to build more advanced financial dashboards, like the one at the beginning of this article, with code to define exactly how your signage should look.

Sign up for a free 14-day ScreenCloud trial, if you haven’t already, then start pulling together your company’s data to build the financial dashboard your team deserves.