Capstone 1 — Sales Performance Dashboard¶
A self-directed capstone. Unlike the guided Sales Dashboard project, here you own the whole thing end to end — sourcing data, defining questions, and presenting findings with minimal hand-holding. This is your portfolio centrepiece.
The Brief¶
You're the first data analyst at a growing retailer. Leadership has no automated reporting and wants a sales performance dashboard they can rely on. You decide what to build, what questions to answer, and how to present it.
Tools¶
SQL · Excel · Power BI (or Tableau)
Difficulty¶
Intermediate — beginner-accessible but you provide the structure.
What You Must Deliver¶
- A clean dataset with documented cleaning steps
- A SQL analysis answering at least 6 business questions
- An interactive dashboard (Power BI or Tableau)
- A written insights summary with recommendations
- A portfolio README explaining the project
Suggested Datasets¶
- Superstore Sales (Kaggle) — the classic
- Any retail/sales transactions dataset
- A synthetic dataset you generate
See the datasets guide for links.
Business Questions to Answer (Define Your Own + These)¶
- What is total revenue and how does it trend over time?
- Which products and categories drive revenue AND profit?
- Which regions/segments perform best?
- What is the relationship between discount and profit?
- Who are the top customers?
- What is the year-over-year growth?
Requirements Checklist¶
- [ ] Data cleaned with documented decisions
- [ ] 6+ business questions answered in SQL
- [ ] Dashboard with KPI cards, trend chart, category breakdown, and a slicer
- [ ] At least 3 DAX measures (Power BI) or calculated fields (Tableau)
- [ ] Revenue AND profit shown (not revenue alone)
- [ ] 3 actionable, quantified recommendations
- [ ] Portfolio README
Evaluation Criteria¶
| Criterion | Weight |
|---|---|
| Data cleaning rigour | 15% |
| SQL analysis depth | 20% |
| Dashboard design & interactivity | 25% |
| Insight quality | 20% |
| Communication & recommendations | 20% |
Stretch Goals¶
- Add a profitability deep-dive page exposing discount/margin issues
- Build an automated refresh pipeline
- Add a forecasting element
- Compare two time periods with variance analysis
Reference the guided version
The guided Sales Dashboard project shows one complete way to do this. Use it as a reference, but make your capstone your own — different dataset, different questions, your own design.
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