What is a profitability report?
A profitability report is a tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., accounting software, ERP systems, CRM) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., profit margins, cost of goods sold, net profit), enabling teams and executives to monitor financial performance and create presentations for stakeholders.
Profitability reports 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 profitability report?
An actionable profitability report balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive profitability reports
Executive reports for CFOs, CEOs, and stakeholders show the company's financial health. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Profitability analysis: by product line, region, or customer segment.
- Cost structure analysis: fixed vs variable costs, cost of goods sold (COGS).
- Revenue analysis: revenue streams, growth trends, and forecasts.
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Manager profitability reports
Manager reports have detailed views with drill-downs to see performance by department, product, region, and team member. They help align teams, define strategies, and include:
- Cost management: tracking expenses and identifying cost-saving opportunities.
- Revenue tracking: compare current performance vs objectives.
- Profit margin analysis for prioritization and spotting issues
- Break-even analysis for product and service lines.
Operational Profitability Reports
Operational reports for analysts and financial managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Expense tracking: budget adherence, variance analysis.
- Revenue recognition: timing and accuracy of revenue reporting.
- Cash flow management: inflows, outflows, and liquidity.
- Inventory management: turnover rates, holding costs.
Operational profitability reports 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 profitability report?
To build a profitability report, 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 report, 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 report. Common sources are accounting software for financial data, ERP systems for operational data, CRM for sales data, and inventory management systems.
To connect your data sources, go to portermetrics.com, choose the data sources to bring to your report.
You can follow these tutorials on connecting your data:
Choose a template
Choose from dozens of profitability report templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like cost analysis, revenue tracking, and financial forecasting.
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 revenue streams, cost data, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "profit" and "expenses".
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 profitability reporting use cases, such as cost analysis, revenue tracking, and financial forecasting.
Select metrics, dimensions, and charts
Once your report 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., Revenue, Expenses, Profit Margin, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g., by date, product line, region, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your reports
Design
To make your profitability reports truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your profitability reports:
Share
Share your profitability reports via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a profitability report?
Profitability reports should include a mix of revenue, cost, efficiency, and profitability metrics and KPIs to fully understand the financial performance towards business goals. They include:
Profitability KPIs measure the financial health of the business:
- Revenue metrics: total revenue, revenue growth, revenue per product
- Cost metrics: COGS, operating expenses, fixed and variable costs
- Profitability metrics: gross profit, net profit, EBITDA
Efficiency KPIs compare your financial outputs to the cost, including:
- Cost efficiency: cost per unit, cost reduction percentage
- Revenue efficiency: revenue per employee, revenue per customer
Effectiveness KPIs compare the input with the output from one financial stage to another
- Cost effectiveness: cost savings, cost avoidance
- Revenue effectiveness: revenue growth rate, customer lifetime value
Financial KPIs show the bottom-line impact of your business performance:
- Profitability: profit margin, return on investment (ROI)
- Liquidity: current ratio, quick ratio
- Solvency: debt to equity ratio, interest coverage ratio
To analyze these profitability KPIs, segment them by:
- Product line: individual products, services
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Region: domestic, international
- Department: sales, production, finance
- Customer segment: retail, wholesale, enterprise
- Cost center: manufacturing, marketing, R&D
