What is Google Data Studio?

In this article, you will learn about Google Data Studio and how its connection with LiveFlow reports can take your dashboards to a new height.

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What does Google Data Studio do?

Google Data Studio is a business intelligence (“BI”) tool that allows you to process, analyze, and visualize data quickly and efficiently. 

It is also handy if you need to share essential information among team members promptly, as other BI tools do. Here’s an example of a company dashboard that tracks its live performance in Google Data Studio and LiveFlow:

This is what you will need to do to visualize your data in no time:

1. You need to prepare a chuck of data streamlined in the format that Google Data Studio requests.
2. Import it to Google Data Studio. You can import data to Google Data Studio from the services Google provides, such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, Google Sheets, or third-party products. In our example, we rely on QuickBooks data streamlined into Google Sheets with LiveFlow. Here’s a Google Sheet you can use to sync your QBO data in Google Sheets, make a copy here.
3. Make a copy of this free LiveFlow Google Data Studio template and track your Profit & Loss, Cash Flow, and Balance Sheet performance 
4. Design and customize your report as you want.

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What does Google Data Studio enable you to do?

• Design variations you can create are infinite, as many types of objects are available such as scorecards, graphs, tables, maps, etc.
• You can compare the latest data with previous data (e.g., a performance in the latest month against one in the same month in the last year).
• The comparison results, such as performance in the last month vs. this month, can be easily shown as text or visualized objects in scorecards or charts.
• You can flexibly change periods of data sets, daily, monthly, quarterly, yearly, and customized ranges, depending on the granularity of dates in your imported data.
• The report is easily shared among team members.
• If you connect your accounting data with LiveFlow to it, it will always be up to date and present your metrics in real-time.

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Why should you leverage LiveFlow as a data resource for Google Data Studio?

1. You can automate your repetitive work and save days. LiveFlow lets you update your dashboard automatically as it pulls data from QuickBooks in real time.
2. LiveFlow can minimize your work and focus on the metrics that matter to you and your business. You can extract only the necessary data and customize the scope, so you don’t need to process information from scratch to create a new sheet to export. 

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Here is the video of one of LiveFlow users, Terrell Turner,  explaining how valuable LiveFlow is to keep a KPI dashboard for his client up to date