How to Make a Graph in Excel Showing Revenue & Expenditures

i Hemera Technologies/Photos.com/Getty Images

Whether you consider yourself more of a visual visionary or prefer to provide your stakeholders with infographics about your business, a chart or graph is a quick way to see financials such as revenues and expenses at a glance. With Microsoft Excel, you can produce a single chart from two sets of financial data – incoming and outgoing – which can help with next year’s budgeting or seeing where you need to rev up your team. Simply populate Excel’s grid with your custom data and the software will automatically create a graph with the information.

Launch Microsoft Excel. Click into the first cell in column B, cell B1. Type “Revenue” or your preferred column header such as “Income” or “Payments.”

Press the “Tab” key to move over one cell into C1. Type “Expenses” for your column header or your preferred text such as “Costs.”

Click into cell A2. Type the reference for the first cost and expense, such as “January,” to create a revenue and expenses chart that tracks these two things monthly. You can also use employees’ or work groups names such as “Marketing,” “Sales” and “Accounting.”

Press the “Enter” key to drop one cell into cell A3. Type the next reference point, such as “February.”

Press “Enter” and fill in the cells in column A until you have all the data points you want to track.

Click into cell B2, the first cell under the first column header “Revenue.” Type the revenue for that data point, such as January’s income in the monthly example.

Press the “Tab” key to move into cell B3 under “Expenses.” Type the expenses for that data point, such as January’s costs for the business.

Complete the grid by entering all of the information in the cells.

Highlight all of the cells you just typed, including the column and row headers.

Click the “Insert” tab and review the Charts section of the ribbon. Click one of the chart types, such as “Column,” which is helpful when you want to show two data points at the same time – revenues and expenses.

Choose a sub-chart type, such as 3-D Column or Cylinder and Excel inserts the chart, taken from your data, into the Excel spreadsheet.