Q21: The finance department needs a variance analysis story that compares actual financial performance against budgeted figures. The report should allow finance users to drill into different dimensions, such as department, cost center, and period.
How would you design and create a story that shows variance analysis, and what key components would you include to make it interactive and detailed for financial analysis?
Ans: In order to design and create the variance analysis story for comparing actual financial performance against budgeted figures, we have to create a user-friendly, and detailed report to it.
We can approach the design as follows:
– Creating key figure metrics and dimensions that the finance users will require. Key figure metrics should include actual financial performance, budgeted financial performance, variance, percentage variance, etc. Dimensions for analysis should also be created which include departments, cost centers, periods, and regions.
– Next is to design the variance analysis story layout which should be structured and intuitive. The layout can contain a high-level overview (summary view) defining KPIs and a variance overview. The other section can be a detailed breakdown which should contain variance by department, variance by cost center & variance by period.
– Add interactive filtering and drill down which can include filter panel and drill down capabilities.
– Now we can create visualizations to support the analysis such as bar charts, variance bar/column charts, heatmaps, line charts, gauge/progress indicators, etc.
– We can add key components for interactivity which may include filters and drill-downs, tooltips, dynamic updates, conditional formatting, etc.
– Letting users save customized views or preferences on the basis of the specific filters, and easy download options will help with user personalization experience.
– We can also use narrative insights or annotations for internal communications or generate automatic insights for proper user experience.
– Role-based access can be provided to the right people who have access to relevant financial data by defining user roles with appropriate permissions.
By focusing on such user interactivity and drill-down features, we can create a proper variance analysis story to offer valuable insights into the financial performances of the finance team.
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