How to Create an Expense Report in Looker

Building an informative expense report in Looker is a surefire way to gain control over company spending. This guide walks you through the entire process, from getting your data prepared to visualizing trends and sharing your findings with the team. We’ll cover the practical steps needed to turn raw financial data into a dynamic, insightful dashboard.

Why Use Looker for Expense Reports?

Before jumping into the "how," it's helpful to understand why Looker is such a powerful tool for financial reporting. Unlike exporting a CSV from your accounting software and manually building charts in a spreadsheet, Looker offers a live, interactive, and much more scalable solution.

Real-Time Data: Looker dashboards connect directly to your company's database. When an expense is approved and entered, it can be reflected in your report almost immediately - no more waiting for a weekly manual data pull.
Granular Drill-Downs: See a high-level trend, like a spike in software spending? With Looker, you can click that data point to "drill down" and see the individual expenses that make it up. This makes auditing and investigating anomalies incredibly simple.
Centralized & Consistent Logic: The logic for calculating metrics (like what counts as "Travel & Entertainment") is defined once in Looker's data model (LookML). This ensures that everyone across the company is looking at the exact same numbers, eliminating discrepancies from manually-built reports.
Easy Sharing & Collaboration: Once built, you can easily share your dashboard with stakeholders, schedule it to be sent to their inbox every Monday morning, or even set up alerts for when spending exceeds a certain threshold.

Getting Your Data Ready: The Foundation of Your Report

A great report starts with great data. Before you can build anything in Looker's user-friendly interface, the underlying data needs to be accessible and well-structured. This setup phase is typically handled by a data analyst or developer, but understanding it is important for anyone building reports.

What Data Do You Need?

Your expense data likely lives in an accounting platform like QuickBooks, NetSuite, an ERP system, or even company credit card statements. To be used in Looker, this data is usually first loaded into a central data warehouse like BigQuery, Snowflake, or Redshift. A typical expense dataset should include fields like:

Expense ID: A unique identifier for each expense line item.
Employee Name/ID: Who submitted the expense.
Department/Team: The department associated with the expense.
Expense Date: When the expense occurred.
Submission Date: When the report was submitted.
Expense Category: A classification like "Software," "Travel," "Meals," or "Office Supplies."
Vendor: Where the money was spent (e.g., "Delta Airlines," "Staples").
Amount: The total cost of the expense.
Status: The current state, such as "Approved," "Pending," or "Rejected."
Receipt_URL (Optional): A direct link to the receipt for easy auditing.

The Role of LookML: Your Data Blueprint

You don't need to learn how to write LookML to build a report, but you should know what it does. LookML is Looker's modeling layer, it's the code that sits between your database and the reporting interface. Data analysts use LookML to tell Looker what your data means and how it joins together.

They define two key things:

Views: These correspond to a table in your database. You’d have an expenses view containing all the raw fields mentioned above.
Explores: This is the starting point for your analysis. Your data team will create an "Expense" Explore that joins the expenses view with other useful views, like an employees view (to get manager names) or a departments view.

When you sit down to build the report, you’ll be starting from an Explore that your data team has already set up for you.

Step-by-Step: Building Your Expense Dashboard in Looker

With your data prepped and your LookML model defined, you can start building. We'll walk through creating a comprehensive quarterly expense report for the marketing department.

1. Start with the Right Explore

Login to Looker and navigate to the "Explore" section from the main menu. You’ll see a list of available data sources. Find the one prepared for your financial data - it will likely be named something clear like "Expenses" or "Financial Transactions." Clicking on this will take you to the Explore page, which is your canvas for building reports.

2. Select Your Dimensions & Measures

The Explore page has two main sections in the left-hand sidebar: Dimensions and Measures. This is the core concept of building reports in Looker.

Dimensions are the grouping fields - the "who, what, where, and when." They are attributes like Employee Name, Expense Category, or Expense Date.
Measures are the aggregations - the "how much." They are calculations performed on your dimensions, like a Sum of Amount, a Count of Expenses, or an Average Expense Amount.

For your marketing expense report, click on the following fields from the sidebar:

From Dimensions: Expense Category and Employee Name.
From Measures: Total Spend (this would be a sum of the amount field).

After selecting these, hit the orange "Run" button in the top right. Looker will query the database and generate a data table with spending broken down by category and employee.

3. Filter Your Data for Specific Insights

Right now, your report shows all expenses for all time across the company. Let's narrow it down. Find the "Filters" section at the top of the page. You can add filters to focus your report on exactly what you need.

Add the following filters:

Expense Date: Set this to "is in the past 1 complete quarter." Looker has many flexible date options you can use.
Department: Set this to "is equal to" and type "Marketing."
Status: Set this to "is equal to" and type "Approved," to ensure you're not including pending or rejected expenses in your total.

Click "Run" again. Your data table will now update to show only approved marketing expenses from the last quarter. Much more useful!

4. Visualize Your Expense Data

A table of numbers is accurate, but charts make insights easier to spot. Click on the "Visualization" tab next to the "Data" tab. Looker provides a wide variety of chart types.

Try creating a few different visualizations for your report:

Pie Chart: Spend by Category. Remove "Employee Name" from your dimensions for a moment, leaving only "Expense Category" and "Total Spend." In the Visualization tab, select the Pie chart icon. This will instantly show you what percentage of the marketing budget went to software, travel, advertising, etc.
Bar Chart: Spend by Employee. Now swap your dimensions again. Keep "Employee Name" and "Total Spend" and remove "Expense Category." Select the Bar chart option to easily see which team members had the highest expenses.
Single Value: Total Quarterly Spend. To create a big-number KPI, remove all dimensions and keep only the "Total Spend" measure. Choose the "Single Value" visualization to get a clean, bold number representing the department's total spend for the quarter.

5. Assemble Your Visualizations into a Dashboard

A "Look" in Looker is a single saved report/visualization. A "Dashboard" is a collection of these Looks, arranged on a single page. For a full expense report, a dashboard is the best final product.

For each chart you create, go to the gear icon in the top right and select "Save" > "To a new dashboard."

You can name your new dashboard "Marketing - Quarterly Expense Report" and add each of your saved Looks as a "tile." Go ahead and create tiles for:

Total Quarterly Spend (Single Value)
Spend by Category (Pie Chart)
Top Spenders by Employee (Bar Chart)
Detailed Expense Table (Table)

Once on the dashboard, you can drag and drop these tiles to arrange them however you like, making a clean, readable, and comprehensive report.

Advanced Tips for Your Looker Report

Once you have a primary dashboard, you can enhance it with some of Looker’s more advanced features.

Set Up Scheduling: In your finished dashboard, click the gear icon and find the option for "Schedule delivery." You can configure the dashboard to be emailed as a PDF to your department head and finance team every Monday morning, so they get regular updates without having to log in.
Create Alerts: Maybe you're fine with department spending as long as it doesn't cross a threshold. You can add an Alert to one of your KPI tiles. For example, you can set an alert on the "Total Spend" tile to email you if the quarterly spend exceeds your budget.
Enable Drill-Downs: This is one of Looker's best features and is usually enabled by your data team. If they've configured drill fields, you can click on any segment of your pie chart (e.g., "Software") and a new window will pop up showing the individual line-item expenses that make up that total.

Final Thoughts

Creating an expense report in Looker transforms the process from a tedious manual chore into a powerful strategic activity. By connecting directly to your live data source and using the intuitive Explore interface, you can build dynamic, sharable, and actionable visualizations that give you a true understanding of where company money is going.

Looker is incredibly powerful for companies with data teams ready to support business users. However, for marketing and sales teams who need instant answers without wading through clicks or waiting on analysts, the process can still feel complex. We built Graphed to simplify this workflow further. Instead of manually selecting dimensions, filters, and chart types, you can simply ask in plain English: "Create a dashboard showing our marketing team’s spending by category for last quarter" and get a live, interactive dashboard built for you in seconds.