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How to Create an Accounts Payable Dashboard in Looker

Cody Schneider•

Building an Accounts Payable (AP) dashboard in Looker can transform how you see your company's cash flow, turning a complex spreadsheet into a clear, interactive command center. An effective AP dashboard gives you an instant, high-level view of what you owe, when it's due, and where your processes can be improved. This article provides a step-by-step guide to help you define the right metrics and build a valuable AP dashboard in Looker from the ground up.

First, Why You Need an AP Dashboard

An Accounts Payable dashboard isn't just a fancy report for the finance team, it's a critical tool for managing the financial health of your entire business. It moves you from reactive payment processing to proactive financial strategy. With a well-built dashboard, you can get immediate answers to important questions:

  • Improved Cash Flow Management: Know exactly how much cash you need and when. Delaying payments strategically without hurting vendor relationships becomes easier.

  • Better Vendor Relationships: See which invoices are overdue at a glance, helping you avoid late fees and maintain a good reputation with your suppliers.

  • Identify Bottlenecks: Pinpoint where invoices get stuck in the approval process so you can streamline operations and reduce manual work.

  • Track Discounts: Easily monitor whether your team is taking advantage of early payment discounts, which can add up to significant savings.

Step 1: Define Your Key Accounts Payable Metrics

Before you build a single chart, you need to decide what to measure. A dashboard is only as useful as the metrics it tracks. For Accounts Payable, you should focus on metrics that give you a complete picture of performance, from total liabilities to process efficiency. Here are the essential AP KPIs to include:

Total Outstanding Payables

This is the simplest yet most fundamental metric: the total amount of money your company currently owes to its vendors. It’s your top-line AP number and provides an immediate snapshot of your short-term liabilities.

Days Payable Outstanding (DPO)

DPO measures the average number of days it takes for your company to pay its invoices to suppliers. A high DPO means you’re holding onto cash longer, which can be great for liquidity. However, a DPO that is too high might signal that you're paying vendors late, potentially straining relationships. The formula is:

(Average Accounts Payable / Cost of Goods Sold) * Number of Days in Period

Your dashboard should track this metric over time to see trends and compare your performance to industry benchmarks.

Invoice Aging Report

This is a breakdown of your outstanding payables by time buckets, much like an accounts receivable aging report. It typically groups overdue invoices into categories:

  • Current (Not yet due)

  • 1-30 days overdue

  • 31-60 days overdue

  • 61-90 days overdue

  • 91+ days overdue

This visualization, usually a bar or column chart, immediately shows you which invoices need urgent attention to avoid damaging vendor relationships or incurring penalties.

Invoice Processing Cycle Time

How long does it take your team to process an invoice, from the moment it's received to the moment it's approved for payment? A shorter cycle is better, as it indicates an efficient approval workflow. Tracking this metric helps you spot inefficiencies, like invoices sitting in someone’s inbox for too long, and find opportunities for automation.

Early Payment Discount Capture Rate

Many suppliers offer a small discount (typically 1-2%) for paying an invoice early (e.g., within 10 days instead of the usual 30). While a single discount might seem small, they can add up to substantial annual savings. This metric tracks the percentage of available discounts your team successfully captures. An ideal rate is 100%, but anything less shows there's money being left on the table, often due to slow invoice processing.

Invoice Processing Cost

This metric calculates the total expense associated with processing a single invoice, including employee salaries, technology costs, and overhead. While harder to calculate precisely, a simplified version can be estimated and tracked over time. The goal is to lower this cost by improving efficiency and automating manual tasks. A downward trend in this metric is a clear sign that your process improvements are working.

Step 2: Prepare Your Data for Looker

Looker is incredibly powerful, but it doesn't just magically find your data. It sits on top of a database or data warehouse (like Google BigQuery, Snowflake, or Amazon Redshift) and uses a modeling layer called LookML to define your business logic.

To build an AP dashboard, you’ll first need to get your payables data into a central database that Looker can connect to. Your invoices, vendor information, payment data, and approval statuses likely live in an ERP system (like NetSuite or SAP) or accounting software (like QuickBooks, Xero, or Bill.com).

The high-level data workflow looks like this:

  1. Extract and Load: Use an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tool to pull data from your accounting software and load it into your data warehouse. This creates a central source of truth.

  2. Model in LookML: This is where the magic of Looker happens. A developer or data analyst on your team will need to write LookML code to define your dimensions (like Vendor Name, Invoice Date) and measures (like Sum of Invoice Amount, Count of Invoices). They’ll also create the logic for complex metrics like DPO and aging buckets.

This data preparation step is the most technical part of the process, but it's essential. A well-structured LookML model makes building and exploring reports fast and intuitive for a non-technical business user.

Step 3: Build Your AP Dashboard in Looker, Tile by Tile

Once your LookML model is ready, you can start building your dashboard. In Looker, dashboards are made up of individual components called Tiles, which can be visualizations (charts) or text. Each tile is typically based on a query you create in an Explore - Looker's interface for building reports.

Let's walk through creating a few tiles for our key metrics.

Example 1: The 'Total Outstanding Payables' KPI Tile

KPI tiles are great for showing a single, important number at the top of your dashboard.

  1. Start in an Explore: Navigate to the relevant Explore for your Accounts Payable data.

  2. Select Your Fields: From the field picker on the left, find and select the measure for Total Invoice Amount.

  3. Apply Filters: You only want to see unpaid invoices. Find a dimension like Payment Status and filter it to only include values like "Unpaid," "Open," or "Pending Approval."

  4. Run the Query: Click "Run" to see the result. You should have a single number representing your total AP balance.

  5. Choose Visualization: In the Visualization tab, select the "Single Value" option. Looker will display the number in a large, easy-to-read format.

  6. Save to Your Dashboard: Click the gear icon in the top right and select "Save" > "To an existing dashboard." Choose your new AP dashboard and give the tile a clear name like "Total Outstanding Payables."

Example 2: The 'Invoice Aging' Bar Chart Tile

This visualization gives you an immediate sense of overdue payments.

  1. Start a New Query: Go back to your AP Explore.

  2. Select Your Fields: This time, you'll need two fields:

    • A dimension for your Aging Bucket (e.g., "1-30 Days," "31-60 Days"). This logic should have been pre-defined in your LookML model.

    • A measure, such as Sum of Invoice Amount or Count of Invoices, depending on what you want to see.

  3. Apply Filters: Again, filter for Payment Status = "Unpaid." You may also want to exclude the "Current" bucket to focus only on overdue invoices.

  4. Run the Query and Visualize: Run the query. In the Visualization tab, select the "Bar" or "Column" chart option. This will create a clean visual breakdown of outstanding amounts by aging bucket. Customize the colors to highlight dangerously old invoices (e.g., making the 90+ day bar red).

  5. Save to Your Dashboard: Save this tile to your AP dashboard, naming it something like "Overdue Invoices by Aging Bucket."

You can repeat this process for all your other KPIs - creating line charts for trends like DPO over time, pie charts for payables by vendor, and tables for detailed invoice-level views. Once your tiles are arranged, add interactive dashboard filters at the top (e.g., for Date Range, Vendor, or Department) to allow users to slice and dice the data themselves.

Step 4: Best Practices for an Effective Dashboard

Building the tiles is one thing, designing a truly useful dashboard is another. Here are a few final tips:

  • Start High-Level, Then Drill Down: Place your main KPIs (like Total Payables) at the top. Put more detailed charts and tables further down so a user can see the summary first and explore details if needed.

  • Think About Your Audience: A CFO might want to see high-level trends like DPO, while an AP manager needs to see specific overdue invoices. You might even create different versions of the dashboard for different audiences.

  • Use Alerts: Looker allows you to set up alerts. For example, you can create an alert to notify you or your team via email whenever the value of invoices in the "61-90 days overdue" bucket exceeds a certain threshold.

  • Keep it Simple: Don't cram too many charts onto one dashboard. Too much information can be overwhelming. Stick to the essential metrics and use whitespace to make the visuals easy to read.

Final Thoughts

Building an Accounts Payable dashboard in Looker requires an upfront investment in data preparation and modeling, but the payoff is enormous. It moves your financial operations from sifting through spreadsheets to making data-driven decisions that directly impact cash flow and operational efficiency.

The process in BI tools like Looker involves quite a few technical steps and often demands data engineering resources to get started. We built Graphed to simplify this entire workflow, especially for marketing and sales analytics. Instead of defining metrics in code, you just connect your platforms like Google Analytics, Shopify, or Salesforce, and ask for what you need in plain English. Graphed automatically generates live, interactive dashboards, helping teams get answers in seconds without needing a technical background or a lengthy setup process.