What’s the best chart layout for displaying profit/cost/revenue/turnover
Some background
I work as an independent consultant, and as such I use multiple 3rd party software to keep track of my billable hours, sent invoices, due taxes, bank mutations, etc. However, as with any 3rd party solution, it never does exactly what I want it to do, nor are these tightly integrated with each other, so I decided to build my own solution on SAP's PaaS solution, SAP HANA Cloud Platform
The issue
My application will have a dashboard which should display, among other useful things, a YTD graph (or graphs?) with aggregated monthly costs, earnings, and cumulative profit.
Initially I came up with the following idea:
The 'dual stacked columns' depicts the costs (left) and earnings (right), stacked up by category (invoices, taxes, monthly costs, etc) The blue line shows the cumulative profit after each month.
Now, the real issue I'm facing is that this graph does not seem very 'obvious':
- I feel the distinction between costs and earnings could be better visualized
- If I have more categories (approx. 8-12) the stacks become less usable I think
- Although there is a direct correlation between the costs, earnings and cumulative profit, the line graph does not enhance that correlation, visually
What could be a solution?
It could well be my graph of choice is totally ill-chosen, but I'm not sure what it should be... As I have total freedom of how the final result will look like, anything is possible so please think outside of the box. :)
Ideally, I want the data—monthly aggregated costs/earnings sliced down by category, as well as the (cumulative) profit—to be shown in a single graph. However, if you have good pointers why it should be in separated graphs, then please, by all means show me why and where I'm wrong.
Any help towards a feasible, viable and desirable graph is highly appreciated!
Update
I have added a more accurate graph. Please note this is a mashup between an Excel graph and MS Paint thingamajiggery, so the handdrawn blue line does not represent the true cumulative profit based on the monthly costs/earnings