Graph Designs for Rapidly Assessing Budget Performance

Lots of good ideas here... if you design reports for others, you can never get enough of seeing how other people succeed in designing something that does an exemplary job of communicating the information the information consumer needs to know.

Graph Designs for Rapidly Assessing Budget Performance: "Here are some of the highlights that made Dylan’s solution stand out:
Budget performance is directly expressed a variance percent.


It is easy to compare the overall performance of departments to one another using the ranked bar graph at the top.


It is easy to examine the performance for a specific department month by month throughout the year.

It is easy to visually link a selected department’s overall performance in the upper graph to its monthly performance in the corresponding graph at the bottom simply by pointing to a bar in the upper graph, which automatically highlights all associated bars in the corresponding small graph below.


The fact that December data isn’t included is clear from its omission in the small month-level graphs. The partial month of November has also been excluded. It could have been included but displayed differently than the other months (for example, by using a dimmer color of blue for that bar), but Dylan correctly reasoned that it would not make much sense and might create confusion to express the percentage variance to budget for only a half-month’s worth of data, which would look like good performance even if there were a large under-budget variance.


The small graphs at the bottom – one per department – can be compared to one another because they use a consistent quantitative scale."