How to Create a Supply Chain Dashboard in Google Sheets

Tracking your supply chain performance can feel like piecing together a puzzle with missing pieces spread across a dozen different systems. A solid dashboard brings clarity, helping you spot delays, manage inventory, and keep costs in check without constant headaches. This article will walk you through, step by step, on how to build a dynamic supply chain dashboard right inside Google Sheets.

First, Which KPIs Should You Track?

Before you start building, you need to know what you’re measuring. A powerful dashboard tells a story with data, so focus on metrics that give you a clear view of your operational health. While your specific needs might differ, most great supply chain dashboards track a mix of these core KPIs.

Inventory Management Metrics

Inventory on Hand: The total quantity of products you currently have in stock. This is your baseline for understanding what you can sell and ship.
Inventory Turnover: How many times your inventory is sold or used in a period. A higher number is usually better, indicating efficient sales and management.
Days of Supply: The number of days your current inventory will last based on your average sales rate. This helps prevent stockouts.

Order Fulfillment Metrics

Order Fill Rate: The percentage of orders completely filled from existing stock on the first attempt. A high fill rate leads to happy customers.
On-Time Delivery Rate: The percentage of orders delivered to the customer by the promised date. This directly measures your delivery performance and customer satisfaction.
Order Cycle Time: The average time it takes from when a customer places an order to when they receive it. A shorter cycle time means a more efficient process.

Supplier and Cost Metrics

Supplier On-Time Delivery: The percentage of shipments from your suppliers that arrive on schedule. This is crucial for keeping your production and fulfillment lines running smoothly.
Transportation Costs: The total amount you spend on shipping, either as a total figure or as a percentage of your revenue.

Step-by-Step: Building Your Supply Chain Dashboard in Google Sheets

Ready to build? Let's get started. For our example, we'll pretend we're tracking orders and inventory for a small e-commerce business. The same principles apply no matter how complex your operations are.

Step 1: Get Your Data into Google Sheets

Your dashboard is only as good as the data feeding it. The key to a manageable Google Sheet dashboard is good organization. Best practice is to have at least three separate tabs:

Raw Data: This is where your raw, untouched data lives. Think of it as your single source of truth. You might have one tab for sales orders, another for inventory levels, and a third for supplier shipments.
Calculations Sheet: A dedicated tab for all your formulas, pivot tables, and data wrangling. This keeps your dashboard tab clean and fast.
Dashboard: The public-facing tab where all your beautiful charts, graphs, and scorecards will be displayed.

Initially, you may need to manually download CSV files from your different platforms (like Shopify, your warehouse management system, or your 3PL partner) and copy the data into your 'Raw Data' tabs. This works, but it can be time-consuming. As you get more comfortable, you can explore tools like Zapier or Make.com to automatically send data from other apps into your Google Sheet, which saves a ton of time.

Step 2: Clean and Summarize Your Data

With your data in one place, head to your 'Calculations' tab. This is where you’ll transform the raw data into dashboard-ready numbers. Let’s create a small summary section to calculate our main KPIs.

Imagine your 'Raw Orders Data' tab has columns for Order Date, Product, Status ("Shipped", "Delivered", "Delivered On-Time"), and Units Sold. And your 'Raw Inventory Data' has columns for Product and Quantity on Hand.

In your 'Calculations' tab, you can use formulas to summarize this information.

On-Time Delivery Rate:

To calculate the percentage of orders that arrived on time, you can use the COUNTIF function. This function counts cells that meet a certain condition.

(This formula divides the number of on-time orders by the total number of orders to give you a percentage.)

Total Units Shipped:

Use the SUMIF function to add up all units sold for shipped orders. The SUMIF function is perfect here, it lets you sum numbers based on a condition.

(This sums up values in the 'Units Sold' column only for rows where the status is "Shipped.")

Total Inventory on Hand:

This one is simple. Just a straightforward sum of your inventory data.

Create a small summary table in this sheet to house all your KPIs. This organization makes it much easier to connect your charts later.

Step 3: Design Your Dashboard Tab

Now for the fun part. Go to your 'Dashboard' tab and start thinking about the layout. A good dashboard presents the most important info first.

Top: Place your main KPIs, or "scorecards," here. These are the big numbers like "On-Time Delivery Rate" and "Total Inventory on Hand."
Middle: Use this space for charts and graphs that show trends over time or compare categories.
Bottom: Detailed tables (if needed) can go here. For example, a list of your top 10 products by sales volume.

For a clean look, select the entire sheet, go to View > Show, and uncheck "Gridlines." You can use cell borders to create your own structure and merge cells to create tiles for your metrics and headings.

Step 4: Add Visualizations

With the structure in place, it's time to bring your data to life with charts and scorecards.

KPI Scorecards

These are the easiest and often most impactful visuals. In your dashboard, simply make a cell equal to one of the calculations you made earlier. For example, in a cell you've designated for your on-time delivery rate, type:

Assuming 'B2' in your 'Calculations' sheet has the on-time delivery formula. Increase the font size, make it bold, and give it a helpful label like "On-Time Delivery." Repeat this for all your core metrics.

Line Chart for Trends Over Time

Line charts are perfect for showing how a metric has changed. In your 'Calculations' tab, create a small summary table of "inventory levels by month" using a SUMIF or a Pivot Table. Once you have that table, a few clicks is all it takes:

Select your monthly inventory data.
Go to Insert > Chart.
Google Sheets will default to a chart type. Choose "Line Chart" if it isn't already selected.
Customize the titles and colors under the "Customize" tab in the chart editor.
Once you're happy, cut (Ctrl+X or Cmd+X) and paste (Ctrl+V or Cmd+V) the chart into your Dashboard tab.

Bar Chart for Comparisons

Want to compare performance across suppliers? A bar chart is your best friend. Follow the same process as the line chart. In your 'Calculations' sheet, create a summary of on-time deliveries broken down by supplier. Then, select that data and insert a bar (or column) chart to get a quick, clear comparison of supplier performance.

Sparklines for In-Cell Trends

Sparklines are tiny charts that live inside a single cell, giving you a quick visual trend without taking up much space. Let's say you have a table on your dashboard showing daily sales for the past week in cells B2 through H2. In cell I2, you could add this formula:

This will create a mini line chart right inside the cell, showing you the week's sales trend at a glance. It's great for adding context to tables.

Step 5: Make It Interactive with Slicers

A static dashboard is helpful, but an interactive one is even better. Google Sheets Slicers let you filter charts and tables on your dashboard with just a click.

Create a chart or pivot table as you normally would. For example, a chart showing sales by product category.
Click on the chart or the pivot table you want to filter.
Go to Data > Add a slicer.
A slicer menu will pop up. In the sidebar, choose the column you want to filter by — for instance, "Product Category" or "Supplier."
Now, you can move this slicer over to your dashboard. When you select a specific category from the slicer's dropdown menu, all the connected charts will instantly update to show only data for that category. It’s a powerful way to let your team explore the data on their own.

Some Limitations to Keep in Mind

A Google Sheets dashboard is an amazing and free tool, but it's important to know its boundaries.

Manual Updates: Unless you set up automations, you'll be manually updating the 'Raw Data' tab, which can be repetitive and introduces the risk of human error.
Slower Performance: Once your dataset reaches thousands of rows, Google Sheets can start to feel sluggish and slow to load.
Data Connectivity Chaos: Stitching together data from multiple sources requires either manual copy-pasting or complex integrations, which can quickly become a bottleneck.

Final Thoughts

By bringing your supply chain data into a single Google Sheet, calculating your KPIs, and visualizing the results, you've created a powerful command center for your business. It transforms messy spreadsheets into clear, actionable insights that can help you make smarter stocking decisions and improve your fulfillment process without expensive software.

While DIY dashboards in Google Sheets are fantastic, the manual data wrangling can eventually become a full-time job. This is exactly where we thought there had to be a better way. With Graphed, we made it our mission to automate the painful parts. You simply connect your data sources like Shopify, your shipping platforms, and ad accounts with one click. We then keep your dashboards updated in real-time, so you’re always looking at live data — not a report that was stale last Tuesday. It takes just a few seconds to ask for the charts you need in plain English instead of spending hours building them yourself.