How to Create a Startup Dashboard in Excel with ChatGPT

Creating a startup dashboard in Excel can feel like a data-heavy project, but using ChatGPT as your co-pilot can turn a complicated process into a manageable one. This guide will walk you through the entire process, from defining your key metrics to prompting ChatGPT for the exact formulas and chart ideas you need. You'll learn how to build a dynamic tool for tracking your business performance without having to be an Excel wizard.

Step 1: Define Your Key Metrics (KPIs)

Before you touch a single cell in Excel, you need to decide what you’re going to measure. A dashboard is only useful if it tracks the numbers that actually drive your business forward. These are your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

For a typical startup, especially a SaaS company, your essential KPIs might include:

• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): The lifeblood of any subscription business. It shows your predictable revenue stream.

• Customer Churn Rate: The percentage of customers who cancel their subscriptions in a given period. Keeping this low is critical for growth.

• Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): The total revenue you expect to generate from a single customer over the course of your business relationship.

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The total cost of sales and marketing to acquire a single new customer. The ratio of LTV to CAC is a crucial indicator of business health.

• New Signups / Leads: A top-of-funnel metric that indicates the health of your marketing efforts.

Pinpoint 5-7 core KPIs that give you an honest snapshot of your startup's health. Don't overcomplicate it, clarity is your goal.

Step 2: Gather and Wrangle Your Data

This is often the least glamorous part of the process, but it’s the most important. ChatGPT can’t help you if your data is a mess. Your data lives in different platforms - Stripe for payments, Google Analytics for website traffic, HubSpot or Salesforce for sales, and so on.

Your goal is to consolidate this information into a single, clean Excel workbook. For this step, you’ll likely need to:

1. Export Data as CSVs: Go into each platform (e.g., your payment processor, CRM) and export the relevant data for the time period you want to analyze.

2. Clean and Structure Your Data: Create a new Excel workbook and dedicate one sheet to each raw data source (e.g., a "Sales Data" sheet, a "Website Traffic" sheet). The key is to organize your data into a simple, tabular format. This means:

   • Each column has a clear header (e.g., "Date," "Customer ID," "Plan," "Amount").

   • Each row represents a single record (e.g., one payment, one new customer).

   • Remove any merged cells, unnecessary formatting, or subtotals.

For our example, let's assume we have a simple sales data export that looks like this in a sheet named SalesData:

This "tidy" data is the foundation for everything that comes next.

Step 3: Prompt ChatGPT for Formulas and Logic

Now the fun begins. Create a new sheet in your workbook and name it "Dashboard." This is where your visuals will live. On another sheet, perhaps named "Calculations," we will create summary tables that feed the dashboard. We will use ChatGPT to generate the formulas for these tables.

Calculating Core KPIs

Let's start by calculating our core KPIs. On your "Calculations" sheet, set up a simple table for your metrics. Then, ask ChatGPT for the formulas.

Prompt for Total Revenue:

I have an Excel sheet called SalesData with columns for 'Date', 'Customer_ID', 'Plan', 'Status', and 'Amount'. On a new sheet, what is the Excel formula to calculate the total sum of the 'Amount' column?

ChatGPT will likely give you a straightforward answer:

=SUM(SalesData!E:E)

Prompt for Number of Active Customers:

Using the same SalesData sheet, I need an Excel formula to count the number of unique customers who have a 'Status' of 'Active'. The customer identifier is in the 'Customer_ID' column.

This is a more complex request. ChatGPT can handle it and will likely return a formula combining UNIQUE and FILTER or something suitable for your version of Excel:

=ROWS(UNIQUE(FILTER(SalesData!B:B, SalesData!D:D="Active")))

By simply describing your data structure and what you want to achieve in plain English, you can get powerful formulas without having to memorize Excel's syntax.

Creating Summary Data for Charts

Dashboards are visual. To create charts, you first need summary data. For instance, to plot revenue over time, you need a summary table with a "Month" column and a "Total Revenue" column.

Prompt for Monthly Revenue Summary Table:

I want to create a line chart showing total revenue per month. In my SalesData sheet, column A has the 'Date' of each transaction and column E has the transaction 'Amount'. On my 'Calculations' sheet, I have listed the months in column A (e.g., Oct-23, Nov-23, Dec-23). What formula can I put in column B to calculate the total revenue for the corresponding month in column A?

ChatGPT's response will probably be a SUMIFS formula:

=SUMIFS(SalesData!E:E, SalesData!A:A, ">="&A2, SalesData!A:A, "<"&EDATE(A2,1))

(Assuming "A2" is the cell with the start date of the month, like 10/1/2023).

Fill this formula down for each month, and you now have a perfect little table ready to be turned into a chart.

Step 4: Building the Visuals

With your KPIs calculated and your summary data ready, you can now build visualizations. This is where your dashboard comes to life.

Creating Your First Chart

Take the monthly revenue table you just created with ChatGPT's formula. Select that data, then go to Excel’s menu and choose Insert > Recommended Charts and select a line or bar chart. Voila! You have your first visual.

Getting Chart Ideas from ChatGPT

Don't know the best way to visualize your data? Ask ChatGPT!

I need to create a startup dashboard in Excel. I have the following KPIs: MRR, Churn Rate, New Customers per Month, and LTV. Can you suggest the best chart type for each and what the layout of the dashboard should look like?

ChatGPT might give you recommendations like:

• MRR: "Use a line chart to show the trend over time. For the current MRR, use a large, single-number 'card' visual."

• Churn Rate: "A line chart is also good here to track trends, but if you want to compare it against a target, a gauge chart could be effective."

• New Customers per Month: "A column chart works well here as it makes it easy to compare volumes month-over-month."

• Layout: "Place your most important KPIs as large number cards at the top (e.g., Total MRR, Active Customers). Below that, put your trend charts like MRR over time and New Customer acquisition."

This gives you a professional design model to follow without needing a background in data visualization.

Step 5: Putting It All Together and Making it Interactive

Now, arrange your charts on the "Dashboard" sheet. Copy your KPI values from your "Calculations" sheet and paste them as "linked pictures" or directly linked cells formatted to look like big, clear numbers (KPI cards).

To make your dashboard interactive, you can use Slicers. Slicers are user-friendly buttons that allow you to filter your data. If you have data for different product plans, you can create a slicer to filter the entire dashboard by plan type.

Not sure how? Just ask ChatGPT:

How do I add a Slicer in Excel to my dashboard that filters my charts and data by the 'Plan' column in my SalesData sheet?

ChatGPT will guide you through the process of formatting your data as an Excel Table and then inserting a slicer, connecting it to your charts or PivotTables.

The Reality Check: The Limitations of Excel + ChatGPT

You’ve now built an impressive startup dashboard. But it's important to acknowledge the limitations of this approach. While powerful, it remains a very manual process.

Every week or month when you want to update your report, you have to:

• Log into all your different data sources (Stripe, Google Analytics, social media ads, etc.).

• Manually export new CSV files.

• Copy and paste that new data into your raw data sheets in Excel.

• Refresh everything and pray none of your formulas break.

This process is time-consuming and prone to human error. Your dashboard is always out of date, reflecting past performance rather than real-time information. It shows you what happened, but requires a lot more digging to figure out why.

Final Thoughts

Pairing Excel with ChatGPT is a fantastic way to quickly build a custom dashboard without needing deep technical knowledge. You get the flexibility of Excel while using AI to handle the heavy lifting for formulas and logic, allowing you to focus on the metrics that matter most for growing your startup.

However, that constant cycle of downloading and updating reports is a major bottleneck - and it's one of the big reasons why we created Graphed. Instead of painstakingly exporting CSVs and pasting them into spreadsheets, we connect directly to your data sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce. Your dashboards become live and update themselves automatically, in real-time. You can just ask questions in plain English like "Show me a dashboard comparing Facebook Ads spend vs. revenue last month" and it builds it for you, giving you back hours that were once lost to manual reporting.