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Businesses generate huge volumes of financial data from revenue, expenses, budgets, forecasts, and performance metrics. On its own, this data is hard to interpret and even harder to act on. This is where financial charts play a critical role.
Financial charts turn raw numbers into visual insights, helping businesses identify trends, compare performance, and understand financial health at a glance. Instead of scanning rows of figures, decision-makers can quickly see what’s growing, what’s declining, and where attention is needed.
Tools like Excel make financial chart creation accessible to analysts, finance teams, and business owners. With the right approach and chart types, financial charts in Excel can support reporting, forecasting, and strategic planning without unnecessary complexity.
In this blog post, you’ll learn the following:
Definition: Financial charts in Excel are a visual representation of numerical data related to money, revenue, expenses, profit, or overall business performance, making financial reporting in Excel clearer and easier to understand. It helps you track trends, compare values, and understand financial movement over time in a simple visual form.
A finance chart in Excel can display growth, losses, forecasts, and patterns that are difficult to see in raw spreadsheets, making decision-making faster and more reliable for financial reporting in Excel.
Financial graphs and charts in Excel make it easy to understand large volumes of data at a glance, helping you grasp insights quickly.
They improve productivity by turning raw data into actionable insights. You can predict risks, track performance metrics in real time, and identify gaps in your business strategy. Using a solid financial analytics approach, including a comprehensive 3-statement financial model, makes it easier to spot areas for improvement.
Explore the best financial graphs examples for smarter decision-making:
A Stacked Waterfall Chart visually shows changes in values over time or across multiple datasets. It highlights the cumulative effect of a data series and allows easy comparison between multiple series through stacked bars, similar to traditional Waterfall reporting.
This chart is especially useful for analyzing the impact of different factors on a total value, such as in a price comparison template in Excel, or for identifying trends and disparities across multiple datasets.
A Scatter plot uses Cartesian coordinates to display values as dots, helping you visualize the relationship between two variables
Use it to compare key metrics and uncover patterns or correlations. For example, you can track how click-through rates impact conversion metrics in digital marketing. Scatter Plots reveal hidden “cause-and-effect” relationships between data points.
Types of correlations include:
A Dual Axis Bar and Line Graph (one of the best financial graphs and charts in Excel) is best suited for comparing two sets of key metrics for a presentation.
It helps reveal trends, correlations, and patterns in limited space, making it ideal for presentations and performance analysis. You can use it to track revenue versus expenses, website traffic versus conversion rates, or any two related metrics, providing a clear, side-by-side comparison for better decision-making.
A Stacked Bar Chart divides each bar into sub-bars, showing part-to-whole relationships over time. It’s easy to read, handles large datasets without appearing cluttered, and clearly displays how subcategories contribute to the total.
This chart is particularly useful for comparing multiple categories, tracking changes over time, and spotting trends across different segments, such as sales by product line, departmental expenses, or regional performance metrics.
A Progress Bar Chart displays the completion of tasks or goals, making it ideal for monitoring objectives and long-term financial targets.
Filled bars indicate progress, often using colors like green and red to highlight growth or decline. This chart is essential for ongoing monitoring and evaluation.
A Multi Axis Line Chart displays multiple financial metrics on separate value axes, making it easy to compare trends that use different scales. It helps reveal relationships between indicators like revenue, expenses, profit, and cash flow within a single, clear visual.
A Funnel Chart visually represents how financial data progresses through sequential stages, highlighting reductions at each step. It helps identify where the largest drop-offs occur in processes like transaction validation, reporting, or approval workflows.
A Sunburst Chart visualizes hierarchical financial data across multiple levels, making it easy to see how each segment contributes to the whole. It helps break down complex finance workflows, such as transactions, channels, and statuses, into a clear, intuitive structure.
A Sankey Chart visualizes how values flow between categories, with the width of each path representing the size of the contribution. It’s widely used in finance to show how revenue is allocated and how costs reduce profit across different stages.
A Waterfall Chart shows how revenue or budget changes step-by-step through positive and negative contributors, helping you understand the factors driving the final value. It’s especially useful in financial analysis in Excel for visualizing quarter-wise movement in revenue, profit, or budget variance.
A Tornado Chart compares the impact of different factors side by side, making it easy to see which items, costs, or variables have the greatest influence on results. Its horizontal bar layout highlights the largest variations first, helping analysts quickly identify key drivers in financial or business performance.
A Comparison Bar Chart displays multiple categories side by side, making it easy to compare values across different groups or time periods. It’s widely used in finance and business to visually analyze performance trends, identify growth patterns, and highlight differences between products or segments.
A Clustered Column Chart places multiple data series side-by-side within each category, making comparisons across groups easy and visually clear. It’s widely used in finance to analyze trends across products, quarters, or regions within the same timeframe.
A Tree Diagram visually breaks down financial data into hierarchical levels, helping viewers understand how categories contribute to the whole. It’s especially useful in finance for exploring product portfolios, revenue sources, or cost structures in a clear top-down view.
A Multi Axis Spider Chart visualizes multiple financial metrics simultaneously, allowing you to compare investment products across different performance dimensions. It helps reveal strengths, weaknesses, and trade-offs for each asset class in a single, intuitive graphic.
In the coming section, we’ll cover how to create financial charts in Excel.
Excel, often paired with an income statement template in Excel, is one of the most popular tools for businesses and professionals looking to visualize data.
However, the default Excel features offer only basic financial graphs and charts in Excel. These tools can make creating a clear financial market graph or professional financial graphs a challenge.
The good news is, you don’t have to give up Excel. By installing third-party apps, you can transform Excel into a powerful data visualization tool.
With ready-made charts, you can quickly create detailed financial diagrams and accounting graphs that make your data easy to interpret and present.
Why ChartExpo?
ChartExpo is a financial chart maker that comes as an add-in you can easily install in your Excel.
With different insightful and ready-to-use visualizations, including a Tornado chart and a Sankey chart in Excel, ChartExpo turns your complex, raw data into compelling visual renderings that tell the story of your data.
With just a few clicks, the app produces simple and clear visualization designs.
Yes, ChartExpo generates financial graphs in Excel that are amazingly easy to interpret, even for non-technical audiences, making it one of the most efficient financial chart makers available.
Keep reading because we’ll show you how to install and use ChartExpo to generate visually stunning financial charts in the coming section.
In this section, we’ll use a Progress Visualization (one of the proven financial graphs and charts in Excel) to display insights into the table below:
| Level 1 | Level 2 | Level 3 | Level 4 | Level 5 | Amount |
| US & Canada | Revenue | 3,930,000,000 | |||
| Europe, M.E | Revenue | 2,780,000,000 | |||
| Latin America | Revenue | 1,160,000,000 | |||
| Asia-Pacific | Revenue | 962,715,000 | |||
| Revenue | Gross Profit | 3,530,000,000 | |||
| Revenue | Cost of Revenue | 5,310,000,000 | |||
| Revenue | Gross Profit | Operating Profit | 1,500,000,000 | ||
| Revenue | Gross Profit | Operating Cost | Marketing | 916,617,000 | |
| Revenue | Gross Profit | Operating Cost | Tech & Dev | 673,341,000 | |
| Revenue | Gross Profit | Operating Cost | G & A | 439,273,000 | |
| Revenue | Operating Profit | Net Profit | 937,838,000 | ||
| Revenue | Operating Profit | Interest Expense | 175,212,000 | ||
| Revenue | Operating Profit | Tax | 210,312,000 | ||
| Revenue | Operating Profit | Other Expense | 172,747,000 |
This will automatically turn your data into an informative visualization.
Choosing the right chart for financial data helps communicate insights clearly.
A financial graph has two axes: the horizontal x-axis along the bottom and the vertical y-axis along the side. The x-axis typically represents categories or time periods, while the y-axis shows numerical values. By interpreting the position of data points along these axes, you can quickly understand trends, comparisons, and patterns in financial data.
The primary purpose of charts in financial analysis is to visualize data, making complex numbers easier to understand, spot trends, compare metrics, and support informed business decisions.
Today’s businesses generate massive amounts of data from financial transactions. Every dollar coming in or going out needs to be accounted for, creating enormous datasets. In the modern world, data is like gold—the insights it provides can drive growth and boost profitability.
Raw data alone is silent. To unlock its value, you need the right tools to interpret it quickly and effectively. This is where Excel financial graphs and charts come in.
Excel is a popular tool for data visualization, widely used by professionals and business owners. However, its built-in charts are often basic and require extra time to customize for meaningful insights.
The solution? Third-party tools like ChartExpo, an Excel add-in packed with ready-to-use financial charts in Excel. It requires no programming skills, making it easy to transform your data into actionable insights.
Start your 7-day free trial today and gain access to professional financial graphs and charts in Excel that are easy to interpret and perfect for your audience.
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