Uncover Financial Insights with Interactive Private Equity Dashboards
Successful private equity firms need the ability to easily access and analyze data across their portfolio. Accurate financial, operational, sales, and other data must be available on demand to measure performance and make smart decisions. However, as a private equity firm’s portfolio grows, so do the complexities of analyzing data across portfolio companies.
Once data is centralized and standardized, private equity firms can significantly improve the way they analyze data by using interactive private equity dashboards built on modern business intelligence tools like Power BI, Looker, or Tableau. These interactive private equity dashboards not only provide a holistic view of data for all existing companies in a portfolio but also enable everyone from C-suite executives to analysts to easily run financial, operations, and sales reports to inform decisions with up-to-date information.
Interactive private equity dashboards can alleviate a variety of challenges across your company. Here are just a few examples of the enterprise-wide return on investment for incorporating dashboards into daily functions:
- Centralized Data: Viewing reports in a centralized location leads to significant time savings. It cuts out the need to generate disparate reports for each data source.
- User-Friendly Dashboards: Intuitive dashboard design means metrics are easy to read and always up to date, eliminating reliance on IT to provide refreshed data.
- A Holistic View: Executives can easily assess portfolio company performance using reports that compare financial information across the entire enterprise.
- Improved Access: Business users can quickly access data ranging from sales and marketing data to inventory and operations data.
- Anticipation of Demand: Managers can utilize dashboards to forecast fluctuations in the next business cycle and set measurable goals.
At 2nd Watch, we have helped many private equity firms modernize their data analytics and reporting solutions, including creating interactive private equity dashboards. In our experience, the end vision of how interactive dashboards can fit into your day-to-day functions is often a bit foggy at first. That’s why we created sample dashboards in Power BI to help clarify how they can unlock the benefits mentioned above.
These interactive private equity dashboards illustrate how to drill into a holistic, enterprise-wide view, as well as how to upgrade your cash conversion cycle (CCC) and cash balance reports and integrate them into your daily functions.
Enterprise-Wide Financial Dashboard
This dashboard highlights essential financial KPIs at an enterprise-wide level. It can include information ranging from simple revenue or gross profit metrics to expense overhead or financial absorption. From this report alone, executives gain a snapshot of their overall financial health. This information can be quickly filtered to specific dates, regions, branches, and departments.
The dashboard can also benchmark your key metrics against your budget or the previous year’s metrics. This visual supplies managers with an overview of current KPIs to assess different areas of performance while creating actionable insights in a single screen.
From the enterprise-wide financial dashboard, any KPI requiring further investigation can be drilled into by clicking on the specific visual. For instance, clicking on the “Revenue” box will navigate the user to the revenue detail report. The report generates additional KPIs – such as revenue PY and YoY change – to provide further insights. This allows managers to get a distinct idea of their historical performance or see more specific details about particular metrics.
Within this visual, users can further slice and dice their KPIs by dates, departments, or other relevant attributes.
Cash Conversion Cycle Interactive Dashboard
As a financial executive, you want to be able to quickly understand CCC trends across the enterprise. The visual below demonstrates how to display your company’s trends in a digestible manner. This dashboard shows the number of days required to convert investments in inventory into cash and also trends this data against previous months. For one of 2nd Watch’s private equity clients, a similar report enabled financial subject matter experts to quickly understand how their CCC affects their bottom line and cash flow, as well as how it influences the amount of external funds needed.
Cash Balance Interactive Dashboard
Cash balances are another immensely important criterion that private equity associates often need to access quickly. A dashboard summarizing cash balances for each account and the cash balance trend over time enables associates to track up-to-date financial data when rolling up companies. This type of dashboard also helps executives gain more visibility into their business and understand how to better assist their clients.
These days, the rich information required to successfully run any private equity firm calls for a strong data strategy. The Power BI interactive dashboards demonstrated above are only a few examples of the wide variety of options available to you.
At 2nd Watch, we have helped private equity firms implement entire data analytics solutions from start to finish and have overseen focused analytics projects to help clients attain more modern analytics. Contact us for a complimentary 60-minute whiteboard session to get started.
