Key Metrics for Your Business Growth with FreshBooks

Looking for accounting software? FreshBooks is the best cloud accounting software for small to medium-sized businesses to do time tracking, expenses tracking, and invoice payment. Using FreshBooks makes billing quick and easy. It provides a payment history that makes it easier to look back at previous work in any past transactions or payments. It’s easy to get this document from FreshBooks if clients request a copy of the document.

You might find yourself in FreshBooks to see how to set up recurring payments, how to track unpaid customers, how much time or money you’re spending, or how much profit you’re earning. Bold BI allows you to track all these accounting-related activities in one dashboard to improve your business performance.

In this blog post, we are going to explore key accounting and financial metrics in FreshBooks and monitor them through a Bold BI dashboard that helps to improve your business growth.

Defining key accounting metrics

The following accounting and financial metrics are the key performance indicators to monitor your company’s financial health:

• Total expenses and revenue
• Payment status
• Customer growth over a time period
• Categories that accrued most expenses
• Countries that brought more revenue

Let’s see how each of these key metrics can be visualized through a Bold BI dashboard that financial analysts and marketing executives can then use to monitor and improve the business growth of your company.

Total expenses and revenue

Revenue and expenses are basic accounting terms that occur in any financial statement, such as an income statement, balance sheet, or cash flow statement. With these metrics, you can calculate the profit and loss over a time period in your business.

The KPI Card widget is the best one to use to visualize the expenses and revenue over a time period and performance compared with a previous time period.

In KPI Card, the background color depicts the quality of the current status of revenue and expense; the arrow indicator represents the decrease or increase in revenue and expense. With just these two attributes of KPI Card, one can easily estimate the revenue and expense performance.

Payment status

The best widget to showcase this metric is a Pie Chart. With its slices, the rate of paid, unpaid, and partially paid customers can be easily identified.

Customer growth over a time period

Customer growth is a key factor to measure your company’s reputation among market audiences.

With a Line Chart, the distribution of customer growth over a time period can be visualized. With this, a CEO or marketing manager can understand the trend of customer growth and make business decisions accordingly.

Categories that accrued most expenses

Any expense should be meaningful and have a positive impact on business growth. Outliers should be identified and changed.

The Bar Chart is suitable to showcase the expenses based on category. With this, you can identify the outliers and take necessary action.

Countries that brought more revenue

Identifying the countries bringing in more revenue will let you decide where to improve campaigns targeting more revenue and apply the successful patterns from the high-revenue countries.

The Column Chart is best suited for this metric.

Creating FreshBooks dashboard

You can create a dashboard either from scratch or by using a built-in dashboard template. Check out our tutorial video for how to create a dashboard from scratch. Follow steps from this documentation to create a FreshBooks data source, add required widgets to your dashboard, and connect data to them to visualize metrics.

To choose the built-in FreshBooks dashboard template, select the + icon in the navigation bar on the left.

Choose the Start from Template option. Then, choose the FreshBooks dashboard template from the list. Now, a FreshBooks template dashboard will load with sample data.

You can also visualize your own data in a template dashboard. To do so, click Connect Your Data at the top of the dashboard preview.

An authorization window will ask you to provide your FreshBooks account details.

Enter the requested authentication details to connect to your FreshBooks account from your dashboard. After entering the information, click Continue to prepare the dashboard. Once the preparation process is complete, the current page renders the FreshBooks dashboard with your data.

Getting FreshBooks data for defined metrics

Using REST APIs, analyze and fetch data from FreshBooks based on invoices, expenses, clients, and profit/loss. The required FreshBooks REST API endpoints for the defined metrics are illustrated in the following table.

FreshBooks also provides reports for detailed data on various aspects of your business. Bold BI supports fetching all types of reports through corresponding API endpoint URLs. To get a profit and loss report from FreshBooks, make use of the following URL and connect in the Bold BI FreshBooks New Data Connection window.

https://api.freshbooks.com/accounting/account/accountid/ reports/accounting/profitloss_entity?start_date=2017-01-01&end_date=2017-12-31

Conclusion

We hope this article helps you build a FreshBooks dashboard using Bold BI and visualize key accounting and financial metrics. If you have any questions on this blog, please feel free to post them in the following comment section. Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free 15-day trial and create more interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can also contact us by submitting your questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.