How to Create a SaaS Dashboard in Google Sheets with ChatGPT

Creating a SaaS dashboard doesn’t have to involve expensive business intelligence software or a dedicated data team. You can build a surprisingly powerful and insightful dashboard using two tools you already have access to: Google Sheets and ChatGPT. This article provides a step-by-step guide to help you structure your data, define your metrics, and use ChatGPT as a formula-writing assistant to bring your dashboard to life.

First, Define Your Key SaaS Metrics

A dashboard is only as useful as the metrics it tracks. Before you type a single formula, you need a clear understanding of what you want to measure. For a SaaS business, this means focusing on metrics that reflect growth, customer value, and retention. Cluttering your dashboard with vanity metrics will only obscure the insights you actually need to run your business.

Essential SaaS Metrics to Include

Here are some of the most critical metrics you should consider for your dashboard. Start with these, and you can always add more later.

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): The lifeblood of a SaaS business. This is the predictable revenue you can expect to receive every month.
Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR): Your MRR multiplied by 12. It provides a higher-level view of your business's scale.
Churn Rate (Customer & Revenue): The rate at which you're losing customers (customer churn) or revenue (revenue churn) over a given period. It's a critical indicator of customer satisfaction and product-market fit.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The total cost of sales and marketing to acquire a single new customer.
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): The total revenue you can expect to generate from a single customer over the course of their relationship with your company.
LTV:CAC Ratio: This ratio compares a customer's lifetime value to their acquisition cost. A healthy ratio (often cited as 3:1 or higher) indicates a sustainable and profitable business model.
Average Revenue Per User (ARPU): The average amount of monthly revenue you receive per active user. This is great for tracking revenue expansion from upgrades or add-ons.

Structure Your Google Sheet for Success

A well-organized spreadsheet is the foundation of a reliable dashboard. If your data is messy and scattered, your metrics will be inaccurate, and making updates will be a nightmare. The best practice is to separate your raw data from your dashboard and calculations.

How to Organize Your Tabs

Set up your Google Sheet with at least two (and preferably three) separate tabs:

Raw Data: This is where you will paste your data exports from other platforms like Stripe, Chargebee, your CRM, or your billing system. Avoid making edits or typing formulas in this tab. It should be a clean record of your source data. Your columns might include CustomerID, SubscriptionDate, ChurnDate, MRR, AcquisitionChannel, and CustomerStatus.
Dashboard: This is the beautiful, clean final product. It will be the "front page" that displays all your key metrics, charts, and visualizations. The cells in this tab will pull information from your Raw Data and Calculations tabs.
Calculations (Optional but Recommended): This is a hidden "workshop" tab. It’s where you can house complex formulas and summary tables that feed into your main dashboard. This keeps your Dashboard tab clean and focused only on presentation, making troubleshooting much easier.

Getting Your Data into Google Sheets

For this manual dashboard approach, you'll need to regularly export transaction or subscription data from your source systems. For example, in Stripe, you can export your subscription data as a CSV file and then copy and paste it into your 'Raw Data' tab in Google Sheets.

When you paste the data, do a quick sanity check:

Are dates formatted correctly as dates, and not text? (Select the column, go to Format > Number > Date).
Are revenue figures formatted as numbers/currency?
Are all the column headers clean and consistent?

Maintaining a consistent data import process is half the battle. If an export from Stripe has a column named "MRR" one month and "monthly_recurring_revenue" the next, your formulas will break. Keep your column names identical with each update.

Your AI Formula Assistant: ChatGPT + Google Sheets

Now for the fun part. Instead of staring at a blank cell and trying to remember the syntax for VLOOKUP or SUMIFS, you can ask ChatGPT to write the formulas for you. The key is to write clear, specific prompts that give ChatGPT the right context about your spreadsheet.

Step-by-Step Examples: From Prompt to Formula

Let's walk through calculating a few key SaaS metrics using ChatGPT.

1. Calculating Total Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

This is a great warm-up. It's often a simple SUM of your MRR-per-customer column.

Your ChatGPT Prompt:

"I have a Google Sheet with a tab named 'Raw Data'. In this tab, Column E contains the MRR for each active customer. Write me a formula to calculate the total MRR by summing all the values in Column E."

ChatGPT's Formula:

=SUM('Raw Data'!E:E)

How it works: This is a straightforward formula that simply adds up every number in column E of your 'Raw Data' sheet.

2. Counting Monthly New Customers

Here's a slightly more complex task. We need to count customers whose subscription started within a specific time frame, like the previous month.

Your ChatGPT Prompt:

"In my 'Raw Data' tab, Column C contains the 'Subscription Start Date' for each customer. The dates are formatted as MM/DD/YYYY. I need a Google Sheets formula that counts how many new customers subscribed last month."

ChatGPT's Formula:

=COUNTIFS('Raw Data'!C:C, ">="&EOMONTH(TODAY(), -2)+1, 'Raw Data'!C:C, "<="&EOMONTH(TODAY(), -1))

How it works: ChatGPT generated a COUNTIFS formula, which counts rows based on multiple criteria.

TODAY() gets the current date.
EOMONTH(TODAY(), -2)+1 finds the first day of the previous month.
EOMONTH(TODAY(), -1) finds the last day of the previous month.
The formula then counts any date in Column C that falls between these two dates.

3. Calculating Customer Churn Rate

Calculating churn can be tricky, so it's a perfect use case for ChatGPT. A common way to calculate it is: (Churned Customers in Period / Total Customers at Start of Period) * 100.

You can ask ChatGPT for this in parts.

ChatGPT Prompt (Part 1):

"In my 'Raw Data' tab, Column F has a customer 'Status' ('Active' or 'Churned') and a 'Churn Date' in column G. Write me a formula to count how many customers churned last month based on their 'Churn Date' in column G."

ChatGPT's Formula for Churned Customers:

=COUNTIFS('Raw Data'!G:G, ">="&EOMONTH(TODAY(), -2)+1, 'Raw Data'!G:G, "<="&EOMONTH(TODAY(), -1))

Now, you need the number of customers you started the month with.

ChatGPT Prompt (Part 2):

"Using the same sheet, write a formula to count the total number of customers who were active at the beginning of last month. Their 'Subscription Start Date' is in Column C and should be before the start of last month, and their 'Churn Date' in Column G should either be blank OR after the start of last month."

ChatGPT's Formula for Active Customers:

=COUNTIFS('Raw Data'!C:C,"<" & EOMONTH(TODAY(),-2)+1, 'Raw Data'!G:G,"") + COUNTIFS('Raw Data'!C:C,"<" & EOMONTH(TODAY(),-2)+1, 'Raw Data'!G:G,">=" & EOMONTH(TODAY(),-2)+1)

Finally, in a cell on your dashboard, you’d simply divide the result of the first formula by the second to get your churn rate (and format the cell as a percentage).

Tips for Writing Better ChatGPT Prompts

Be Specific: Mention tab names (e.g., 'Raw Data') and specific column letters (e.g., C:C).
Provide Context: Tell it the data format (e.g., "dates are MM/DD/YYYY" or "statuses are 'Active' or 'Churned'").
Define Your Goal Clearly: Use action verbs like "count," "sum," "average," and be clear about the time period (e.g., "last month," "this quarter").
Ask for an Explanation: End your prompt with "Explain how this formula works." This helps you learn and makes it easier to debug a formula if it's not working correctly.
Iterate and Refine: Your first prompt may not be perfect. If the formula is wrong, tell ChatGPT what's wrong and ask it to fix it. Correcting it is often easier than starting from scratch.

Designing an Informative and Clean Dashboard

Now that you have your formulas, a great dashboard is more than a collection of numbers. Good design helps you see insights at a glance.

Key Dashboard Design Tips:

Use Scorecards: For your main KPIs like MRR and churn rate, use a large font size and give each metric its own space. This makes your most important numbers stand out.
Add Sparklines for Trends: Sparklines are tiny, in-cell charts that are perfect for showing trends without taking up space. For example, if you have a list of MRR totals by month, you can add a sparkline with a simple formula.

=SPARKLINE(B2:M2)

Visualize with Charts: Use line charts to show trends over time (like MRR Growth) and bar or column charts for comparisons (like New Customers by Acquisition Channel). You can even ask ChatGPT for help.

Prompt for Chart-Making Help:

"I have months in Column A and MRR values in Column B on my 'Calculations' tab. Give me the step-by-step instructions for creating a line chart in Google Sheets to visualize this data."

ChatGPT won't create the chart, but it will give you the exact clicks to follow: 1. Select data range A1:B13. 2. Click 'Insert’ on the menu. 3. Select ‘Chart’. 4. In the Chart editor, choose 'Line chart'.

Final Thoughts

Building a SaaS metrics dashboard in Google Sheets is a fantastic, no-cost way to get on top of your data. By structuring your sheet properly and using ChatGPT to generate formulas, you can create a powerful reporting tool that turns raw data into clear, actionable business insights.

However, you will notice that the process of manually downloading CSVs, cleaning data, and pasting it into your sheet quickly becomes repetitive and time-consuming. We built Graphed to automate this entire workflow. Instead of dealing with spreadsheets, you connect your data sources like Stripe, HubSpot, or Google Analytics directly. Then, you can simply ask in plain English, "Show me a dashboard of my key SaaS metrics like MRR, churn, and LTV for this quarter," and we instantly create a real-time, auto-updating dashboard for you in seconds. It frees you from the manual drag of reporting so you can focus on acting on the insights.