Waterfall Charts Templates
Download these 25 Free Waterfall Chart Templates to start preparing your own Waterfall Charts Templates easily.
Introduction to Waterfall Charts:
Graphs and charts are widely used in almost all companies and organizations. Within any organization, there are multiple types of charts that help employees and team members understand a situation and respond to it quickly. Usually, when we talk about a chart or a graph, its key purpose is to evaluate and analyze a situation quickly because it’s displayed in a picture rather than explaining it in a long paragraph.
A waterfall chart is also a very common chart but its most common implementation is in the finance department but it can be used in almost any situation and scenario. In this chart, it is explained how an initial value decreases or increases over a specific period of time. For instance, you want to see how many units of office chairs you will have in stock for the next month and when you use a waterfall chart
You see that there are 50 chairs in stock but 5 of them were broken when people were trying them and 4 of them were fixed quickly which brings us to the final count to 49 perfect salable chairs. The reason it’s called a waterfall chart is that some of the columns don’t have any base but they seem to be suspended in the air and because of that fact, it’s also known as Mario chart.
Uses of Waterfall Charts:
Although with the above explanation, it’s easy to get the basic idea behind a waterfall chart sometimes it’s not so easy to explain particular uses of these charts. Generally speaking, we can say that any business and any department within an organization can benefit from the use of these waterfall charts.
Because the columns in a waterfall chart refer to the positive and negative changes in an initial value, these columns are suspended in the air without any base. Particularly, these charts are beneficial for showing changes in the value of an item over a specific period of time and reaching to the final value. For instance, a legal firm can use a waterfall chart to illustrate the number of clients they had in the starting of the previous year i.e. 250, and how they ended up with 195 clients at the end of the same year.
With the above figures, you can quickly see that the firm lost 55 of its clients but the waterfall chart will illustrate that in first quarter, the firm actually got 20 new clients and in the 2nd quarter, they lost 30 clients. In the same manner, this chart will show that 10 new clients were added to the list in the 3rd quarter but finally, in the 4th quarter, the firm lost 55 clients and the final count of clients at the end of the year was 195. This way you can see that this chart can be used in any situation from inventory keeping to bank account details to revenue tracking to number of orders delivered on time to turnover of employees in the last 2 years.
Free Waterfall Charts Templates
Here are below download links and previews of Waterfall Charts Templates that are designed in MS Word and MS Excel.
Stacked Waterfall Chart Excel
Waterfall Chart in Excel
Source: templatelab
Printable Waterfall Charts Templates
Free Waterfall Charts Templates
Editable Waterfall Charts Templates
Waterfall Charts Templates MS Word
How to Use a Waterfall Chart?
Understand The Basics:
Before using a waterfall chart, you should understand that a waterfall chart can only be used when there are sudden changes in the initial value of an item i.e. an object, account balance, number of clients, or earned profit. Because these changes are sudden and don’t depend on the base value, columns that show these changes aren’t attached to the base of the chart. At any given point, this chart can give you the final value but it doesn’t portray the percentage of increase and decrease in the initial value.
Start With an Initial Value:
You can either draw this chart on a paper or whiteboard or you can also create waterfall charts MS Excel which is an easy and compatible format to edit and share the file with multiple people. Start the chart by mentioning the gradual increase in the value on the left side from bottom to top and then mention the time period i.e. days or weeks or months on the bottom of the chart from left to right. On the bottom left corner, mention the initial value.
Mention Increase and Decrease:
Over the next weeks or months, when you encounter any change in the initial value, you need to mention it on the chart. This can be done by showing a column right above the time period i.e. 1st week, 2nd week, or 1st quarter and the width and height of this column should exactly portray the change in the value. If the value increases, the column will go upward right from the point where it was previously and if the value decreases, the column will drop downward.
Reach to the Final Value:
Although mostly this waterfall chart is used to show the initial value, final value, and changes that led to the final value after a specific period of time i.e. 1 year but even if there is no final value calculated yet, the value of the last column is considered as the final value.
