Explore what a Sales Order Targets and Margins dashboard looks like in Power BI
One of the best features within Power BI is its ability to connect to various data sources. This becomes incredibly useful when you need to incorporate data that you can’t add to the standard Sage system. So, things like sales targets that you can’t get from Sage, can be pulled from Excel or wherever you store this information.
So, let’s talk through this dashboard and you can give it a go for yourself!
If you have not used Power BI before, or wish to refresh your memory, check out the quick tutorial we have put together which demonstrates how to navigate through Power BI.
Sales Order Targets and Margins Dashboard
This dashboard has been designed to help you monitor both sales targets and margins across stock items.
On the first tab, you will see a couple of visuals that give us a clear understanding of how the business is performing against its target. On the left, we have a summary of the performance for each month.
There is conditional formatting applied to highlight any month where the target has not been hit. This makes it easier to for the report user to quickly spot potential issues.
Next, we have a cumulative bar chat that will display how the business is doing overall. Since some months may be over target and some under, this visual helps us identify if we are likely to reach the overall target for the year.
At the top of the page there is also a Target Tracker which will give us a graphical representation of how far we are away from the target.
Amber indicates that we are close to hitting our target and green shows once we have hit it. Rather than just having two figures side by side, this graphical representation gives a visual understanding of how likely the target is to be hit.
What make this report stand out is the ability to filter dynamically – so you can track actual against target with multiple conditions applied. For example, you can filter on ‘Account Manager’ and see how that Account Manager is performing against their target.
As we can see here, Alan’s accounts are well over what they are targeted. We could also go one step further and filter on an individual customer account and track them on their own.
The same principle can be applied to any sort of targets you may report on, whether it’s stock item sales targets or sales rep targets, the report can be built to compare actuals with these figures.
On the next page, you will see the ‘Margin Analysis’ tab. This report is designed to help identify product groups and individual stock items where prices may need to be revised.
In the table on the left, you will see a list of product groups and the margin for each of these.
There are a few conditional formatting rules applied, the first rule changes the font to red if the margin is below 25%, this is for product groups that we need to keep an eye on. There is a second conditional formatting rule that changes the box to Red if it goes negative, these ones require immediate attention as it shows that we are losing money on that product group.
To find which items are impacting this figure, you can press the expansion button next to product group.
This expands the table to show it at stock item level and here we can see that the issue is being caused by one stock item.
If I then wanted to check what orders this item had been on, all I need to so is right click on the line and drill through into the order level details.
This will then provide me with all the orders this item has been sold on.
If you go back to the previous tab, you will also notice two bar charts that display the Top 5 least and most profitable items. This can help us identify which items need to be discontinued and which items might need to be promoted more.
You can also drill in on the bar charts if you wanted to see all the orders that these items are on.
Now that we’ve gone through the Sales Order Targets and Margins dashboard step-by-step, why not try our free interactive dashboard to have a go in navigating around this report yourself?
If you are interested in finding out more about how Power BI can assist you, our experts are here to help. Complete the enquiry form on this page or contact us directly on 01332 959008.
