CFO dashboards: 6 recommended business intelligence tools

Published on June 1, 2022

A CFO's role is strategic at its core. As the ‘middle man’ between data insights and business decisions, the Chief Financial Officer essentially becomes a translator between the numbers and their impacts.

And while every good translator has a near-perfect grasp of their languages, most of them continue to use an entire suite of helpful tools.

A financial dashboard is one of a number of tools that the finance function has available. Yet many in the finance world still use inefficient, traditional paper analysis methods. This is highly flawed, and highly expensive.

In this post we’re going to discuss 6 different CFO dashboard tools and which might be right for your team -- so you can upgrade any broken translations into complete fluency, once and for all.

What are CFO dashboard tools?

As the Chief Financial Officer, it can be difficult to manage all of the incomings, outgoings, payroll, and financial reports. The list of tasks and categories can feel endless, especially when it’s all happening at once.

A CFO dashboard is a digital display tool that keeps everything visible, and holds all of the financial information in one place. We’re talking company cash flow, revenue and financial risk data, etc. Some softwares even offer personalized insights and analysis.

Traditionally, financial dashboards have been a bit of a pain to set up. Inputting the original data, creating rules and deciphering the original patterns are a time-consuming process at the beginning of any new financial system.

However, once set up, there should be very little of a learning curve. Moreover, your team can customize their own dashboard to be as or jargon-free as they need. Alongside being easy to use, this makes a CFO dashboard tool perfect for sharing financial insights with other teams and departments too.

6 CFO dashboard tools

There is lots of diversity when it comes to CFO dashboards. Choosing the right tool depends on several factors, including whether your team prefers a more numerical or visual view of financial data, and what they want to do with the data.

1. Looker

Looker - Prix, tarif, abonnement et avis | GetApp France 2022

Looker’s mission is to help businesses to “find true power in your data”. This means that business intelligence is not solely about the numbers, but also the analysis.

One of the greatest assets at Looker is that it’s powered by Google. This means high-level integrations with much of the tech that your teams are already using, without any friction.

We think Looker is well-suited to teams who are already digitally literate, rather than those transitioning from paper or spreadsheets. Looker’s cloud-based software has many features that tech-savvy teams will be able to make the most out of.

Its costs are variable, depending on your team and the features that you’ll use the most.

2. Tableau

Powered by Salesforce, Tableau is a top-of-the-range embedded business intelligence software. It helps finance teams use the data that they’re able to collect in order to solve problems.

Tableau’s community element helps drive the industry forward, and they also highlight social causes, such as closing the data literacy gap. Their program specifically lends well to a CFO dashboard, with ‘big picture’ and ‘zoomed in’ views on net profit, balance sheet and sales, for example.

Another benefit of Tableau is its pricing visibility. With different packages for ‘viewers’ compared to active users, it lends well to larger organizations who need to share interdepartmental insights.

3. House of Control

Complete Control - Contract Management Software

Marketing themselves as “the CFOs best friend," the House of Control dashboards focus on forecasting and compliance. In order to reduce risk, their data intelligence aims to simplify both budgeting and categorizing, and streamline the entirety of business processes.

House of Control's financial reporting feature is ready within hours, so your finance function can get real-time spending insights, immediately. With seven different CFO dashboards, their program even offers customer ledger data. This means that alongside finance, this technology offers your sales team the ability to make better decisions.

Pricing is not publicly listed, but likely dependent on which of the products you want to use from their suite.

4. Polestar

Key Built-In Features

Polestar’s CFO Cockpit program is what data dreams are made of. This system pushes standardization, leveling the playing field across your departments and creating a newfound feeling of quality control.

Polestar’s software leans closer to traditional metric data analysis, with five distinct categories:

Financial analysis
Ratio analysis
Account receivables
Account payables
Financial projections

CFO Cockpit enables users to set up rich interactive dashboards in minutes, rather than months, to give a clear picture of financial health. Moreover, the snapshot insight means your finance team can implement changes with immediate effect.

5. Geckoboard

Geckoboard promises simplicity. Its filtering system allows teams to focus on just the key metrics that they need, without getting lost in a sea of data. Offering the ability to build forecast dashboards using the budget and real-time spending, the modern CFO should get on well with Geckoboard's data analytics software.

This management dashboard software is likely to be suited to a team that are currently transitioning from paper to digital, or who approach their finances in a more ‘bootstrapped’ manner. Instead of tweaking the thousands of variables and data collection points, Geckoboard gives you oversight on the most important aspects of the business.

6. Datapine

datapine Review: A Powerful Interactive Dashboard Tool

Datapine is all about security. With a focus on data accuracy and verification, their intelligence suite enables finance teams to develop workflows and build predictive analytics based on best practices and preemptive financial indicators.

We think Datapine is well-suited to scaling companies who want to upgrade outdated or inefficient processes. With a focus on outcomes and actionable key performance indicators, Datapine’s software offers a dashboard template with customizable designs that can be tailored to the preferences of your CFO.

Their 14 day free-trial feature means your team can get started with Datapine and make sure it’s right for them before signing a longer contract.

Get clean spend data to fuel your dashboards

CFO dashboards are a key step towards the big picture, allowing the finance function to see and analyze all of the important data in one place. But before you decide on the right dashboard, you'll need to ensure that your team can gather genuine actionable insights. So, don’t let this fail before it’s even begun by plugging in the wrong KPI information.

Spendesk helps you keep all operational spending in one place, with accurate data. No more data entry errors or mistakes that could be avoided. Feed your dashboards with Spendesk data input to ensure accuracy, every time.

Finance tools & tech

Spendesk Team

Spendesk has one goal: to remove the hassle of spending at work.

Get started with Spendesk

Close the books 4x faster, collect over 95% of receipts on time, and get 100% visibility over company spending.

Business spending includes different types of spend:

Strategic spend is usually centralized and managed by C-level executives with dedicated spenders. It can be managed through invoices, wire transfers and purchase orders.
Discretionary and operational spend is also centralized, but spending is done by managers and employees during their daily professional lives. It includes card purchases, subscription payments, digital ads, events, office orders, and business travel.
Expenses, unlike strategic spend, represent a significant amount of small purchases that can be difficult to track. These include card payments, expense claims, team perks, and travel expenses.

Spend management is the process through which companies manage business spending. It takes into account the end-to-end process when someone needs to spend: getting purchase approvals, providing payment methods, submitting and processing invoices, submitting and reimbursing expense claims, chasing receipts and invoices for reconciliation, and assigning the right analytical codes, expense accounts, and VAT rates to all those expenses for bookkeeping.

Spend management tools become necessary when the number of employees increases and the need for clear processes, better visibility and control starts to grow for finance teams.

Employees need flexible, user-friendly tools, in order to spend easily and be empowered to do their job.

That’s when Spendesk can be a good fit.

Spendesk provides payment methods for modern businesses, and a powerful platform for finance teams to manage spending. This includes debit cards to replace old-fashioned company credit cards, virtual cards for online purchases, and automated expense reports for unexpected payments.

For employees
Employees no longer need to spend out-of-pocket. They request funds for a particular purchase, and can use their Spendesk card or virtual card to execute the payment.

If for any reason the employee can’t use their Spendesk card, they snap a picture of the receipt via the Spendesk mobile app and create an expense claim on the spot. This is sent directly to their manager for validation, and on to the finance team.

For finance teams
Each employee has their own Spendesk profile and debit expense card. So unlike the company credit card, you always know who’s spending company money.

The platform lets controllers create spending limits and pre-approvals. C-Level executives or managers will have a different level of pre-approved spend from other staff. Should a team member need to go over their pre-approved budget, they can make a request to their manager via the mobile app or the platform online.

When an expense is made with a Spendesk card, the employee simply snaps a picture of the receipt at the time of purchase. Which means no more lost receipts.

Finance teams can see real-time company spend and follow up on missing receipts or invoices by sending reminders to employees via the platform.

Reviewing expenses is also easier as finance teams can group expenses and assign them the right VAT rates and expense accounts before exporting everything easily to their accounting tools.

Spendesk streamlines the whole business spending process, making spend management intuitive, simple and efficient.