Build Data Studio dashboards from Google Sheets data

A budget kept in a spreadsheet says what you meant to spend, and a dashboard pointed straight at it draws the plan and nothing else. It does not show the plan against actual spend, because the spend lives in the ad platforms. A dashboard is not built to join them reliably, at scale or business-ready, so the join happens in a data warehouse first.

• A plan cell says what was meant to be spent, not what the ad platforms billed
• The data analyst joins plan rows to actual spend by month and channel and controls the result
• Dashboard viewers read plan against actual in one chart, not two tabs

In your data warehouse the data model sets the budget plan beside the spend your ad platforms report, joined on a channel key into one Data Mart.

• Plan rows and actual spend meet by month and channel
• The gap between them is calculated once, in SQL, not in a cell
• Pick up the next change without rebuilding the dashboard

The budget Data Mart is not locked to one dashboard. Planners keep editing the spreadsheet they like, and the same plan reaches an AI assistant with the same definitions.

• Finance keeps maintaining the plan in the spreadsheet; the next load picks the change up
• An assistant reads the same Data Mart, so the plan matches the dashboard