How to Create a Personal Finance Dashboard in Looker

Tracking your finances doesn't have to involve messy spreadsheets and mental guesswork. Building a personal finance dashboard gives you a crystal-clear, at-a-glance view of exactly where your money is going and coming from. This guide will walk you through building your own dynamic dashboard using Looker Studio, the powerful and free data visualization tool from Google.

Start with a Solid Foundation: Your Financial Data

Before you can visualize anything, you need to have your data organized in one place. While some apps automatically scrape your bank data, the most effective way to understand your habits is by tracking your transactions manually for a while. A simple Google Sheet is the perfect tool for this.

Create a new Google Sheet and set it up with the following columns. Sticking to this structure will make connecting it to Looker Studio much easier.

Date: The date the transaction occurred.
Description: A brief note about the transaction (e.g., "Monthly Rent," "Groceries at Safeway").
Category: Assign a category to each transaction (e.g., "Housing," "Food," "Transport," "Entertainment," "Salary"). Be consistent!
Amount: The monetary value of the transaction. Keep it positive for both income and expenses.
Type: A column to specify whether a transaction is "Income" or "Expense." This is crucial for separating the two later on.

Here's what a few rows of your simple tracker might look like:

(Hot tip: Use the Data Validation feature in Google Sheets on the 'Category' and 'Type' columns to create dropdown menus. This saves time and prevents typos that can mess up your charts later.)

Aim to fill in at least a month or two of data. The more data you have, the more interesting your dashboard will be.

Step 1: Connect Your Google Sheet to Looker Studio

With your data prepped, it's time to fire up Looker Studio and bring it to life. Looker Studio is a free tool that allows you to connect to various data sources and build interactive reports.

Navigate to lookerstudio.google.com and create a new, blank report.
You'll immediately be prompted to add data to your report. In the list of connectors, select Google Sheets.
Authorize the connection to your Google account.
Find and select the spreadsheet you just created. Ensure you select the correct worksheet within that spreadsheet. Make sure "Use first row as headers" is checked.
Click Add. A dialog box will confirm that you're about to add this data source to the report. Click Add to Report.

You now have a blank canvas, with your financial data connected and ready to go. On the right-hand panel, you'll see your fields: Date, Description, Category, Amount, and Type. Looker Studio usually does a good job of guessing the data type, but double-check that 'Amount' is set as a Number and 'Date' is set as a Date type.

Step 2: Build the Core Visualizations

Let's start building the most important charts. We'll drag and drop different chart types from the "Insert" menu onto our canvas and configure them using the panel on the right.

The Key Metrics: Scorecards for a High-Level View

Scorecards are perfect for showing your main numbers at the top of your dashboard. Let's create three: Total Income, Total Expenses, and Net Savings.

Total Income Scorecard:

Go to Insert > Scorecard.
Place it at the top-left of your dashboard.
By default, it may show "Record Count." Fret not. In the right-hand panel, under the "Metric" section, click the existing metric and select Amount.
Now, we need to tell it to only show income. A little lower down in the same panel, click Add a filter.
Name the filter "Include Income". For the condition, set it to Include > Type > Equal to (=) > Income. Click save.

Total Expenses Scorecard:

This is even easier. Copy and paste your 'Total Income' scorecard.
With the new scorecard selected, go to the filter section on the right. Click the pencil icon to edit your existing filter.
Rename the filter to "Include Expenses" and change the condition from "Income" to Expense. Save it. Now this card only shows expenses.

Net Savings (or Loss) Scorecard:

This requires a slightly more advanced trick using a "blended data source." Don't be intimidated, it's just a few clicks.

Go to Resource > Manage blended data > Add a data blend.
Table 1 will be your Google Sheet. For its metric, choose Amount. In the filter section for Table 1, add your "Include Income" filter.
Click "Join another table" and select your Google Sheet again. For Table 2's metric, choose Amount. Apply your "Include Expenses" filter here.
No need for a "Join Key." Just rename your blended source at the top to "Income vs Expenses" and hit Save.
Now, insert another Scorecard. In the "Data source" section on the right, select your new "Income vs Expenses" blend.
This doesn't give us the net amount yet. We need one more step: a calculated field. In the "Metric" section, click Add metric > Create field.
Name the field "Net Savings" and use this simple formula:
SUM(Amount) - SUM(Amount_1)
Click Apply. Your third scorecard now shows your net savings! Customize the colors of the scorecards to make them stand out.

See Where Your Money Goes: An Expense Breakdown Chart

Now for the most eye-opening part: seeing which categories eat up most of your budget. A donut chart or pie chart is perfect for this.

Go to Insert > Pie chart (or Donut chart).
In the right-hand settings panel, set the Dimension to Category.
Set the Metric to Amount.
Crucially, we only want to see expenses here. Just like with the scorecard, go down and Add a filter, and select the "Include Expenses" filter you already created.

Instantly, you can see if you're spending more on food, transport, or subscriptions than you thought.

Track Your Progress: Income vs. Expenses Over Time

Are you earning more than you spend each month? A time series chart answers this question beautifully.

Go to Insert > Time series chart.
The main Dimension should default to Date. That's correct.
For your metric, you'll need two to show side-by-side. To do this, we need to create two simple calculated fields from our original data source.
First, remove the default metric. Click Add metric > Create field.
Name the field "Income Amount" and use this formula:
CASE WHEN Type = "Income" THEN Amount ELSE 0 END
Now create a second metric called "Expense Amount" with this formula:
CASE WHEN Type = "Expense" THEN Amount ELSE 0 END
Add both of these new fields as your metrics on the chart. You can now clearly track your income and expense lines month over month. Go to the "Style" tab to change the colors of each line to make it more readable.

Step 3: Make Your Dashboard Interactive

A static report is good, but an interactive one is great. Adding filters, or controls, lets you slice and dice your data on the fly.

Go to Insert > Date range control and place it at the top of your report. This lets you easily switch between viewing your finances for the last quarter, this month, or a custom period.
Next, go to Insert > Drop-down list and place it near your category chart. In the settings on the right, set the Control field to Category. Now you can use this dropdown to filter the entire dashboard to see transactions for just one category, like "Food."

Finish by adding a title to your dashboard using the Text tool and rearranging your charts to create a clean, logical layout. Your high-level numbers should be at the top, with detailed breakdowns below.

Final Thoughts

Congratulations, you now have a working personal finance dashboard! By connecting a simple Google Sheet to Looker Studio, you've created a powerful tool that automatically updates to give you a real-time, visual understanding of your financial health. It’s a rewarding project that replaces ambiguity with actionable clarity.

While building a DIY dashboard like this is fantastic for personal learning and management, using a tool with this many clicks and configurations for professional reporting can become time-consuming. At Graphed, we apply the same data-first principles to marketing and sales analytics, but without the manual setup. We built an AI data analyst that securely connects to your business tools — like Google Analytics, Shopify, or Salesforce — and allows you to create entire dashboards just by describing what you want to see in plain English. Your hours-long dashboard build becomes a 30-second conversation, so you can get an answer and get back to growing your business.