Tag Archives: Chart ideas

Visualizing profit loss statement

chart planet Posted on by

Probably of the most often visualized datasets in the world are profit-loss statements of corporations month after month presented to executives in powerpoints. Millions of them are made and quickly thrown away faster than new Covid-19 case charts. It’s quite strange how few resources are there discussing visualizations of financial data.

Majority of those who do care about finance seem to favour waterfall charts (like this analyst) and for a good reason, because they provide insight a simple table does not have. Some utilize sankey or flow diagrams because they show flows of money in quite an intuitive way (cool example – a squared sankey in Tableau). Also, there are dashboards completely ignoring the specific structure of financial data – good (because it’s bad) example is this dashboard made by “somebody with good Tableau but limited finance knowledge” as said in one comment.

I consider myself as somebody with good financial knowledge so I tried finding a better way to visualize profit loss statement solving some limitations of waterfall and sankey charts:

  • waterfalls look much better when visualizing increases and decreases, but the distribution of revenues or expenses look weird done in this way.
  • sankeys simply cannot visualize negative results in an intuitive way
  • financial activity result is often presented as one line in profit-loss statements and might be positive or negative, so in a usual sankey diagram it would not have a fixed position independent of its value

And here is the result. Sankey is used for basic distribution of revenue or expenses and could be used for showing the further breakdown. The waterfall comes in after Operating profit is calculated and net results of financial and other activities are simply added and subtracted (in this specific case they’re tiny). Profit tax is again visualized as sankey, because usually, it has the same sign as profit. Also, mind the colours, black is used to show positive flows (revenue), blue (which is also provided in the brandbook of Amazon) is used for negative flows (expenses).

This approach allows for visualizing negative results as well. Where else could we look for companies with negative profits except the aviation industry! Here is the profit-loss statement of Lufthansa, a German air carrier. The visualization is a bit awkward at first, but once we get into the waterfall everything becomes simple and intuitive. Also, notice that profit tax is negative – it improves the result.

Of course this way to visualize profit-loss is far from perfect:

One issue is related to labels – when a rectangle is too small, the number does not fit inside. It is easy to solve, however – if labels are necessary they can be shown beside the names of categories.

Another issue is a comparison between time periods – this type of chart can show only one period. However some cross-company insights still could be made – just compare profit margins of Amazon with those of Aramco – the Saudi Arabian Oil Company:

I hope these charts will inspire further discussion about financial data visualization and more great ideas.

Chart idea: Comparative Stacked Bars

chart planet Posted on by

The Stacked Bar chart is one of my favourites, I even made the same stacked bar chart with 9 online tools – but it has one major weakness, it’s difficult to compare changes of its segments over time. I tried finding a way to improve it and here let me introduce the Comparative Stacked Bars:

Comparative Stacked Bars

Triangles show the absolute increase or decrease of each segment. They are colour-coded to make it even easier to read.

It’s limitations:

  • Too many is too many – if there are too many categories the triangles will make the chart look messy and difficult to read. But even more difficult it would be without triangles.
  • Too small is too small – if the change is too small the triangle might become invisible. But without them, the changes would get invisible much sooner – just observe the top segment in the above chart.

The example above was made in R, and the example below was made in Tableau. Unfortunately I have no not-overly-complicated solution for Excel. If anyone knows how to implement it properly, please let me know!

Chart idea: Cake Chart

chart planet Posted on by

The pie chart faces a tremendous amount of criticism for attempts to show part to the whole relations. Of course – it is easily the single most misused chart! However more and more data visualizations practitioners are writing articles to defend it with Robert Kosara being the most thorough and methodical in my opinion.

Here I will offer an alternative which is something like a mix of square pie chart, marimekko and packed bars. Let me introduce the Cake Chart:

It’s features:

  • Always a regular square, total area = 100%.
  • Each segment is a bar for easy comparison, but its area represents the percentage.
  • The height of the chart is distributed evenly among bars.
  • Only the selected number of largest categories are shown separately.
  • All other categories are aggregated into the irregular steppy gray area.
  • If there are 5 categories shown separately, then the largest cannot be larger than 100% / 5 = 20%. For X categories to be shown – the maximum value cannot be larger than 100% / X.

Weaknesses:

  • Aggregated other categories are difficult to compare to bars.
  • There are limitations how long the longest bar can be without destroying the squariness of the square.
  • Square is not as intuitive to be 100% as circle.

Strengths:

  • Bars are super easy to compare.
  • It’s still a regular shape.

It’s quite obvious how to make it – make the panel square, make its background grey. However, making the Others category selectable in Tableau is a challenge and here is the result: