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How to Create an Accounts Payable Dashboard in Looker with AI

Cody Schneider•

Building an accounts payable dashboard provides a clear, real-time view of your company’s cash flow and financial obligations. This guide will walk you through the essential metrics to track and how to build a powerful AP dashboard in Looker, using AI features to simplify analysis and uncover deeper insights.

What is an Accounts Payable Dashboard? (And Why You Need One)

An Accounts Payable (AP) dashboard is a financial reporting tool that visualizes all the money your business owes to suppliers, vendors, and creditors. Instead of digging through spreadsheets or different accounting software modules, a dashboard consolidates key AP metrics into a single, easy-to-understand screen. This helps you monitor financial health, manage cash flow, and track the efficiency of your payment processes.

For any business, especially one that's growing, manual AP tracking quickly becomes unmanageable. It leads to missed payments, lost early-payment discounts, and stressful, last-minute check runs. A dashboard transforms this reactive process into a proactive one.

Here’s why it’s so valuable:

  • Improved Cash Flow Visibility: Instantly see how much money you owe and when it’s due. This is fundamental for accurate cash flow forecasting and management.

  • Avoid Late Fees: By visualizing upcoming and overdue payments, you can eliminate late payment penalties that slowly chip away at your profits.

  • Capture Early Payment Discounts: Many suppliers offer a discount (typically 1-2%) for paying an invoice early. A dashboard helps you identify and prioritize these opportunities, turning your AP department into a source of savings.

  • Stronger Vendor Relationships: Consistent, on-time payments build trust with your suppliers, which can lead to better terms, priority service, and a more resilient supply chain.

  • Pinpoint Process Bottlenecks: If invoices take weeks to get approved and paid, a dashboard will make that logjam obvious. You can track metrics like invoice processing time to identify and fix inefficiencies in your workflow.

Key Metrics for Your Accounts Payable Dashboard

An effective dashboard is only as good as the metrics it tracks. While you can include dozens of data points, focus on these core Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to get the most valuable insights into your company’s financial health.

1. Accounts Payable Aging

This is arguably the most important chart on your AP dashboard. An AP aging report groups your unpaid invoices into time buckets based on their due dates. A typical setup looks like this:

  • Current (Not yet due)

  • 1-30 Days Past Due

  • 31-60 Days Past Due

  • 61-90 Days Past Due

  • 90+ Days Past Due

This visualization instantly tells you which payments are urgent and helps you prioritize who to pay first. A large balance in the 60+ day buckets is a major red flag that requires immediate attention.

2. Days Payable Outstanding (DPO)

DPO measures the average number of days it takes for your company to pay its suppliers after receiving an invoice. It's a key indicator of cash flow management.

The formula is:

A high DPO means you’re holding onto your cash longer, which can be great for liquidity. However, a DPO that's too high might indicate you’re paying vendors late, risking your relationships and reputation. A low DPO suggests you are paying your bills quickly, but you might be missing opportunities to use that cash for other investments or operations before it's truly due.

3. Invoice Processing Cycle Time

This metric measures the total time from when your company receives an invoice to when it is fully paid. A long cycle time can point to inefficiencies in your workflow, like slow approval processes, manual data entry errors, or disorganized document management. Tracking this helps you streamline your operations and reduce staff time spent on manual tasks.

4. Early Payment Discount Capture Rate

How much money are you leaving on the table? This metric calculates the percentage of available early payment discounts that your team successfully captured. For example, if a vendor offers "2/10, n/30" terms, you get a 2% discount if you pay within 10 days. A low capture rate is a sign that your invoice processing is too slow to take advantage of these savings.

5. Late Payment Rate

This is the percentage of your total invoices that are paid after their due date. This metric directly impacts your relationships with suppliers and can lead to unnecessary fees and difficult negotiations for future contracts. Keeping this number as close to zero as possible should be a primary goal for any finance team.

6. Total Amount Payable (by Vendor)

A simple but powerful visualization is a bar chart or table showing the total amount you owe to each vendor, sorted from highest to lowest. This helps you understand which relationships have the biggest financial impact on your business and where the bulk of your cash outflows are directed.

Getting Your Data Ready for Looker

Before you can build visualizations, you need a solid data foundation. Your AP data often lives inside accounting software like QuickBooks, Xero, or NetSuite, or within a larger Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.

The best practice is to first stream this data into a centralized cloud data warehouse like Google BigQuery, Snowflake, or Amazon Redshift. This gives you a single source of truth and allows you to combine AP data with information from other departments (like purchasing or inventory).

Once your data is in a warehouse, you connect Looker. The magic of Looker happens in its modeling layer, called LookML. Think of LookML as a governance layer where you define your business logic once. You’ll create LookML "models" to an in-house data analyst telling Looker:

  • Which database tables contain invoices, vendors, and payments.

  • How those tables join together.

  • The exact calculations for metrics like DPO or Invoice Cycle Time.

By defining everything in LookML, you ensure everyone in the company is using the same definitions for the same metrics, creating consistent and reliable reports.

Building Your AP Dashboard in Looker: A Step-by-Step Guide

With your data connected and modeled, building the dashboard is a straightforward process.

Step 1: Explore Your Data

In Looker, you start in an "Explore." This is an interactive interface where you can select dimensions (like Vendor Name or Invoice Date) and measures (like Total Amount Due) from your LookML model. As you select fields, Looker automatically generates queries and visualizes the results.

Step 2: Create Individual Visualizations (Looks)

For each metric, create a visualization. For example:

  • AP Aging: Create a stacked bar chart. Select the "Aging Bucket" dimension and the "Total Amount Due" measure.

  • DPO Over Time: Create a line chart. Select a time dimension (like "Payment Month") and your "DPO" measure.

  • Payables by Vendor: Create a bar chart or table. Use "Vendor Name" as your dimension and "Total Amount Due" as your measure.

Customize each chart with colors, labels, and formatting to make it easy to read. Each saved chart in Looker is called a "Look."

Step 3: Assemble Your Dashboard

Create a new dashboard and start adding your saved Looks to the canvas. A good layout strategy is to place high-level, critical KPIs like Total AP Outstanding and DPO in large scorecards at the top. Below these, you can place more detailed charts like your AP Aging report and Top Vendors by Amount Owed.

Step 4: Add Filters and Interactivity

Make your dashboard dynamic by adding filters. Common filters for an AP dashboard include Date Range, Vendor, and Invoice Status. This allows your finance team to drill down into the data and answer specific questions, like "How much do we owe to Vendor X from last quarter?" without having to request a new report.

Using AI to Supercharge Your Looker Dashboard

Traditional dashboard building is powerful, but adding an AI layer turns a static report into an intelligent financial assistant. Looker’s integration with Google’s AI services, along with other AI tools, enables capabilities that go far beyond standard charts.

1. Ask Questions in Plain English

New AI features allow users to talk to their data. Instead of dragging and dropping fields, you can simply type a question like, "Show me all invoices more than 60 days overdue" or "Which vendor had the highest payable amount last month?" The system automatically translates your request into a query and generates the visualization for you. This empowers Accounts Payable managers who aren't trained in BI tools to get immediate answers.

2. Anomaly Detection and Proactive Alerts

AI algorithms can constantly monitor your AP data streams and detect unusual patterns you might miss. For example, it could automatically flag:

  • A sudden increase in the average time it takes to process invoices.

  • An unexpectedly large invoice from a regular vendor.

  • A vendor who has stopped offering early payment discounts.

These proactive alerts give you a chance to address issues before they impact your cash flow or vendor relationships.

3. AI-Powered Forecasting

By analyzing historical payment data, vendor terms, and invoice volumes, AI models can generate surprisingly accurate forecasts of future cash outflows. This moves beyond simple reporting to predictive analytics, helping you answer questions like, "Based on our current trajectory, how much cash will we need to cover payables in the next 90 days?" This is incredibly valuable for strategic financial planning.

Final Thoughts

Building an Accounts Payable dashboard in Looker turns a confusing, manual process into a clear, strategic one. It gives you the visibility needed to manage cash effectively, save money, and build stronger supplier relationships. By centralizing key metrics and leveraging AI, you empower your finance team to move from simple reporting to true business intelligence.

We built Graphed because we believe anyone should be able to get these kinds of insights without needing dedicated data teams or extensive BI tool knowledge. Instead of learning LookML and spending days setting up dashboards, you connect your accounting tools like QuickBooks, Shopify, or even data from Google Sheets, and just describe the charts you need. Our AI does the heavy lifting, creating real-time, interactive dashboards from tools your team already uses, allowing you to get answers in seconds, not weeks.