Best Ways to Chart Revenue Trends

Often a simple chart is most appropriate for getting your message across. A bar chart works well to present sales or revenue results over time for a company, product or region, as shown above. The bar chart is most useful to highlight growth rather than seasonality in revenue with typical time periods of years, quarters, or months. I typically add the values for each time period either in the bar or above it.

I'd also strongly recommend that you label your y axis and choose an appropriate level of precision for the data. In this case two or three digits are all that's needed to allow your audience to spot the growth trend. More detail will make your chart cluttered and harder to read.

Here are three alternatives for presenting revenue trends. You can show the same data as a line chart as below:

Whether you use a bar or line chart to show revenue trends is a matter of personal preference. The charts show the same information.?

You can add one or two pieces of supplemental information to your chart as I did below:

I added period over period changes (YoY growth) below the chart in a simple data row. These numbers highlight changes in growth rate over time. You might see a spike in a specific year or a general trend (e.g., increasing growth rate). The growth line shows the compound annual growth rate (CAGR). This is the best measure of average year over year growth over the entire time period covered in the chart.

You can also try splitting revenue into two categories:

Some companies have two revenue types (e.g., products and services), two regions (e.g., domestic and international) or two customer types (e.g., enterprise and small/medium business). The stacked bar provides insight into trends by category but keeps focus on overall changes. Adding the percentage of sales in each category by time period and the CAGR data for each category to the right of the chart allows the audience to see if one or the other category was the primary driver of growth.

I would not recommend using just this chart if sales were divided among three or more categories. The chart will be too cluttered and harder for your audience to make sense of. I'll do a follow-up post that shows charts you can use to highlight sales trends for 3+ categories of customers, revenue types or regions.

As a further aside, you can use the charts above to track measures other than revenue. The four chart examples work will for measuring any key performance indicator (KPI) that's always positive. Some examples are headcount, R&D expenses, and customer support requests received. I'll propose some other options in a later post for tracking trends in measures that can be either positive or negative like EBITDA, cash flow or profit.

I hope you found these charts useful. Message me if you'd like to learn more about the charts, have suggestions for other templates I should create, or if you've got any questions about applying this type of template to your own data visualization needs.