What is a client presentation dashboard?
A client presentation dashboard is an interface tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., CRM systems, project management tools, financial software) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., project progress, budget utilization, client satisfaction), enabling teams to monitor performance and create presentations for clients and executives.
Client presentation dashboards are typically built using flexible tools like Google Looker Studio, Power BI, Google Sheets, or platform-specific solutions to enable high customization and integration of multiple data sources.
What to include in a client presentation dashboard?
An actionable client presentation dashboard balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and clients) and their use cases.
Executive client dashboards
Executive dashboards for CEOs, CFOs, and clients show the bottom-line impact of projects. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Project ROI analysis: by project, using attribution for large budgets.
- Financial analysis: budget vs. actuals, cost savings, revenue impact
- Cohort analysis: client retention, satisfaction, and lifetime value by client cohort
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Manager dashboards
Manager dashboards have cross-project views with drill-downs to see performance by client, project, region, team member, and phase. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Cross-project reporting: overall project, client, or region reporting across projects
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Competitive analysis for benchmarking and strategy mapping
- Client feedback and satisfaction analysis
Operational Dashboards
Operational dashboards for analysts and project managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Project management: task completion, resource allocation, timeline adherence
- Client communication: response times, engagement levels, feedback loops
- Financial tracking: budget utilization, cost overruns, invoicing status
- Quality assurance: error rates, compliance checks, client satisfaction scores
Operational dashboards are highly customized, built in flexible tools like Google Sheets or Looker Studio to enable data cleaning, blending, annotations, and integrating multiple sources.
How to build a client presentation dashboard?
To build a client presentation dashboard, connect your data sources, choose a template on Looker Studio or Sheets, build your queries by selecting metrics and dimensions, choose charts to visualize your data, customize the dashboard, design and share via link, PDF or email.
Here’s the breakdown:
Connect data sources
Define and connect the data sources to bring to your dashboard. Common sources are CRM systems for client data, project management tools for project tracking, financial software for budget and cost data, and communication platforms for client interactions.
To connect your data sources, go to portermetrics.com, choose the data sources to bring to your dashboard.
You can follow these tutorials on connecting your data:
Choose a template
Choose from dozens of client presentation dashboard templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like project tracking, budget monitoring, client satisfaction, and performance analysis.
Learn to copy Looker Studio templates.
While templates are the starting point, make them specific for your business or agency. Map your specific metrics, especially custom client interactions, project milestones, financial data, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "success" and "performance".
Depending on your reporting tool—Google Sheets or Google Looker Studio, pick any of the dozens of templates created by our team and customers to solve your client presentation use cases, such as project tracking, budget monitoring, client satisfaction, and performance analysis.
Select metrics, dimensions, and charts
Once your dashboard template is downloaded, you may 1) modify it or 2) create a blank page to build it from scratch. Whatever the case, setting up a query always follows these steps:
- Select the data source and the account connected to it
- Choose metrics (e.g., project progress, budget utilization, client satisfaction, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g., by date, project name, client, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your dashboards
Design
To make your client presentation dashboards truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your client presentation dashboards:
Share
Share your client presentation dashboards via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a client presentation dashboard?
Client presentation dashboards should include a mix of project progress, financial, client satisfaction, and performance metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of projects towards business goals. They include:
Project progress KPIs measure the advancement of projects, regardless of the client:
- Progress metrics: milestones achieved, tasks completed, timeline adherence
- Engagement metrics: client meetings, feedback received, communication frequency
- Outcome metrics: project completion, client satisfaction, deliverables quality
Financial KPIs compare your project outputs to the cost, including:
- Budget: budget utilization, cost savings
- Revenue: revenue impact, cost-benefit analysis
- Efficiency: ROI, cost per project
Performance KPIs compare the input with the output from one project phase to another
- Progress: task completion rate
- Engagement: client satisfaction rate
- Outcome: project success rate
To analyze these KPIs, segment them by:
- Project: phase, objective
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Client: industry, size, region
- Team: member, role, performance
- Resource: allocation, utilization, efficiency
