How to Create a Company Dashboard in Power BI

Creating a company dashboard in Power BI gives you a powerful way to see all your most important business metrics in one place. Instead of sorting through messy spreadsheets or logging into five different apps, you get a clean, visual summary that tells you exactly how your business is performing. This article will walk you through the entire process, from planning your dashboard and connecting your data to building interactive charts and sharing your masterpiece with the team.

First Things First: Plan Your Dashboard

Jumping straight into Power BI without a plan is a recipe for a cluttered, confusing dashboard. Taking ten minutes to think through a few key questions will save you hours of rebuilding later. A great dashboard tells a clear story, and that starts with knowing what story you want to tell.

Who is this dashboard for?

Is this a high-level overview for your CEO, a detailed marketing performance report for the CMO, or a daily progress tracker for your sales team? The audience determines which metrics matter most. A CEO might want to see overall revenue, profit margin, and customer acquisition cost. A sales manager, on the other hand, needs to see performance by rep, deal pipeline velocity, and conversion rates.

What key metrics (KPIs) must be included?

Based on your audience, list the 5-7 most important Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) they need to see. Trying to cram everything onto one screen is a common mistake. Instead, focus on the metrics that drive decisions. Here are a few examples:

• For a Sales Team: Revenue Year-to-Date, Deals Won vs. Goal, Average Deal Size, Top Performing Sales Reps.

• For a Marketing Team: Website Traffic, Leads Generated, Cost Per Lead, Campaign ROI.

• For an E-commerce Store: Total Sales, Average Order Value, Conversion Rate, Top Selling Products.

Choose metrics that are actionable. It's more useful to know "Conversion Rate by Traffic Source" than just "Total Website Visits."

Where does your data live?

Next, identify the data sources for your chosen KPIs. Is your sales data in a Salesforce report? Is your marketing data in a HubSpot export or a Google Sheet? Maybe your financial data lives in an Excel workbook. Make a list of every source you'll need so you're ready for the next step. Having your data organized and clean will make the connection process much smoother.

Step 1: Get data into Power BI

With a clear plan, it's time to open Power BI Desktop (a free download from Microsoft) and connect your data sources. Power BI can connect to hundreds of different data sources, but for this example, we’ll use a simple Excel workbook - a common starting point for many businesses.

1. Open a blank Power BI report. In the Home ribbon, click on Get data.

2. A window with common data sources will appear. Select Excel workbook and click Connect.

3. Navigate to your Excel file and open it. A new window called "Navigator" will pop up, showing you all the spreadsheets and tables within your workbook.

4. Select the table or sheet containing your data. Power BI will show you a preview on the right.

5. Click Load. If your data is already perfectly clean, this will load it directly into your report. However, most real-world data needs a little tidying up first. For that, you’d click Transform Data.

A quick note on cleaning data in Power Query

Clicking "Transform Data" opens the Power Query Editor. This is a powerful tool inside Power BI for cleaning and shaping your data before you build visuals. You don't need to be an expert, but here are a few common cleaning tasks you might perform:

• Remove Blank Rows: Filters can quickly remove empty rows that would skew your analysis.

• Change Data Types: Ensure your 'Date' column is recognized as a date type and columns with numbers are recognized as whole numbers or decimals. Power BI is usually smart about this, but it's good to double-check.

• Rename Columns: Give your columns clear, reader-friendly names (e.g., change "Cust_ID" to "Customer ID").

Once your data looks good, click Close & Apply in the top-left corner of the Power Query Editor to load your clean data into the report.

Step 2: Start building your visualizations

Now for the fun part. Your data is loaded, and you can see your data fields in the 'Data' pane on the right. We’re going to build a few different charts to bring our company dashboard to life. The basic process is always the same: pick a visual type, then drag and drop the data fields you want to display.

Creating numeric 'Card' visuals for KPIs

Cards are perfect for displaying your most important headline numbers. Let’s create a card for Total Revenue.

1. Click a blank space on your report canvas.

2. In the Visualizations pane, click the icon for the Card visual (it looks like a square with "123" in it).

3. A blank card will appear on your canvas. From the 'Data' pane, find your 'Revenue' field and drag it onto the 'Fields' well of the card visual.

Bingo! You now have a card that shows your total revenue. You can repeat this process for your other top-line KPIs, like "Total Customers" or "Average Order Value."

Creating a line chart to show trends over time

Line charts are excellent for visualizing performance over time. Let's create one for revenue per month.

1. Click a blank space on the canvas again.

2. Select the Line chart icon from the 'Visualizations' pane.

3. From the 'Data' pane, drag your 'Order Date' field into the 'X-axis' well of the visualization.

4. Next, drag your 'Revenue' field into the 'Y-axis' well.

Power BI will automatically generate a line chart showing your revenue trend. You can use the 'Format your visual' options (the paintbrush icon) in the Visualizations pane to add data labels, adjust the title, and change colors.

Creating a bar chart to compare categories

Bar charts are ideal for comparing performance across different categories, like sales by region or traffic by source.

1. Click a blank space on the canvas.

2. Select the Stacked bar chart icon.

3. Drag a categorical field, like 'Product Category', to the 'Y-axis' well.

4. Drag a numeric field, like 'Units Sold', to the 'X-axis' well.

This creates a horizontal bar chart that immediately shows your top-performing categories.

Arranging your dashboard layout

Once you have a few visuals, you can drag them around, resize them, and arrange them into a logical layout. A common and effective layout is:

• Top Row: Your main KPI cards (Total Revenue, Total Users, etc.).

• Middle Row: Your most important charts showing trends or comparisons (like the line and bar charts we just made).

• Bottom Row: More detailed visuals or tables with granular data.

Step 3: Add interactivity with filters and slicers

A static dashboard is useful, but an interactive one is empowering. Power BI makes it easy to add filters that allow dashboard users to explore the data for themselves. The primary tool for this is the slicer.

Let's add a date range slicer so we can filter the entire dashboard by time period.

1. Make sure no visual is selected by clicking on the blank canvas.

2. In the 'Visualizations' pane, click the Slicer icon.

3. From the 'Data' pane, drag your 'Order Date' field onto the 'Field' well of the new slicer visual.

Power BI will create a date slider. Now, when you drag the slider, all the charts and KPI cards on your dashboard will update automatically to reflect the selected date range. You can also add slicers for product categories, sales regions, or any other category to give your team the power to find the insights they need.

Step 4: Publish and share your dashboard

Once your dashboard is looking great in Power BI Desktop, the final step is to publish it to the Power BI Service (the cloud-based version) so you can share it securely with your team.

1. In the Home ribbon of Power BI Desktop, click Publish.

2. You'll be prompted to sign in to your Power BI account if you haven't already. Then, you'll need to select a destination workspace.

3. Once published, you’ll get a link to open the report online in the Power BI Service. From there, you can use the Share button to grant access to your colleagues.

In the Power BI Service, you can also set up a scheduled refresh. This keeps your dashboard data up-to-date automatically, pulling new data from your sources daily or even hourly, so your team is always looking at the freshest information.

Final Thoughts

Building an effective company dashboard in Power BI boils down to a clear process: start with a solid plan, connect and clean your data, build intuitive visualizations, add interactivity, and share it with your team. While there's a learning curve, the result is a central hub for data-driven conversations and smarter decision-making that shifts your company from guessing to knowing.

The manual process of connecting data sources, shaping data in Power Query, and configuring each visual in tools like Power BI can be incredibly time-consuming. We built Graphed to eliminate this friction entirely. You can connect sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce in seconds, then simply ask for the dashboard you need in plain English. We turn hours of clicking and dragging into a 30-second conversation, giving you a real-time, shareable company dashboard without the steep learning curve.