The KPI Framework Every CFO
Dashboard Actually Needs

Revenue vs Budget (Actuals vs Plan)

The most fundamental question: are we bringing in what we said we would? This KPI should show the current period's actual revenue, the budgeted figure, and the variance — both in absolute terms and as a percentage. Colour-coding the variance (green/amber/red) removes the need for the CFO to calculate the gap mentally every time they open the report.

DAX pattern: Revenue Variance % = DIVIDE([Actual Revenue] - [Budget Revenue], [Budget Revenue])

Gross Margin %

Gross margin reveals whether you're making money on what you sell before overhead enters the picture. It's the first sign that pricing, cost of goods, or product mix is moving in the wrong direction. A business can grow revenue while gross margin erodes — and the revenue growth will mask the problem until it's too late.

Formula: (Revenue − Cost of Goods Sold) ÷ Revenue × 100

Track gross margin by product line, customer segment, and geography — not just at the company level. A blended gross margin of 58% that's actually 72% in one product line and 34% in another tells a completely different story than the blended figure suggests.

Operating Cash Flow

Profit and cash are not the same thing, and this is the KPI that reminds leadership of that every time they open the dashboard. A company can be profitable on paper while running out of cash if receivables are slow, inventory is piling up, or large capex commitments are draining the account. Operating cash flow strips out those distortions and shows the underlying cash-generating health of the business.

Key sub-metrics to display alongside OCF:

• Cash conversion cycle (how many days to turn revenue into cash)
• Operating cash flow margin (OCF ÷ Revenue)
• Month-end cash position vs prior month

DSO — Days Sales Outstanding

DSO measures how long it takes, on average, to collect payment after a sale. A rising DSO means customers are paying later — which strains cash flow, increases bad debt risk, and sometimes signals that customers are financially stressed themselves. DSO is a leading indicator of future cash flow problems, which makes it more valuable on a CFO dashboard than many lagging financial metrics.

Formula: (Accounts Receivable ÷ Revenue) × Number of Days in Period

Target DSO varies by industry, but any consistent upward trend over 3+ months warrants investigation. Segment DSO by customer tier, geography, or business unit — the blended average often hides where the problem is actually concentrated.

Operating Expense Ratio (OpEx Ratio)

OpEx ratio (operating expenses ÷ revenue) shows how efficiently the business converts revenue into operating profit. A business that grows revenue while keeping its OpEx ratio flat or improving is becoming more efficient. A business where OpEx grows faster than revenue is heading toward margin compression regardless of top-line performance.

Break OpEx into categories — personnel, technology, facilities, marketing — and show the ratio for each. This allows the CFO to immediately identify which cost category is driving ratio changes, rather than spending three days pulling reports to find out.

EBITDA and EBITDA Margin

EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortisation) is the metric boards, investors, and acquirers use to assess operational performance independent of capital structure and accounting choices. It's the most useful cross-company comparison metric and the one CFOs most frequently have to report upward.

Display both the absolute EBITDA figure and the margin (EBITDA ÷ Revenue). Track them monthly and show the rolling 12-month trend. For businesses with seasonal revenue, also show the trailing 12-month (TTM) figure to smooth out seasonal distortions.

Revenue by Segment, Product, or Region

A single revenue number hides more than it reveals. A business generating ₹50 Cr in revenue needs to know whether that revenue is concentrated in three customers (fragile) or distributed across 200 (resilient), whether it's growing in high-margin product lines or shrinking there while growing in low-margin ones, and whether regional performance is uniform or masking a declining core market.

This KPI is best displayed as a combination of a treemap or stacked bar chart (showing relative contribution) alongside a variance-to-prior-period table. The visual shows proportion; the table shows momentum.

Forecast Accuracy %

This is the KPI most finance teams don't put on their dashboard — and the one that would help them the most. Forecast accuracy measures how close last period's forecast was to what actually happened: (1 − |Forecast − Actual| ÷ Actual) × 100.

A team with 92% forecast accuracy can be trusted when they say next quarter will be challenging. A team with 60% accuracy is essentially guessing — and decisions made on those forecasts will reflect that. Displaying forecast accuracy on the CFO dashboard creates accountability for the quality of financial planning, not just the quality of outcomes.

Track forecast accuracy by department, business unit, and period. When accuracy is low, display the bias direction — are teams consistently over-forecasting or under-forecasting? Directional bias is easier to correct than random variance.