A waterfall chart is a visualization that shows how a series of positive and negative changes accumulate from a starting value to an ending total. Each bar starts where the previous one left off: increases push the running total up, decreases pull it down, and the final bar lands on the ending value. The result reads like a story — here’s where we started, here’s everything that happened, here’s where we ended up.
When to use a waterfall chart
Waterfall charts answer the question “what happened between these two numbers?” Classic examples:
- Revenue bridges. Start with last quarter’s revenue, add new business and expansion, subtract contraction and churn, and end on this quarter’s revenue. Each contribution is visible, and so is its direction.
- Profit and loss breakdowns. Begin with gross revenue, then step through costs — COGS, payroll, marketing — down to net income.
- Headcount or inventory changes. Opening balance, additions, departures, closing balance.
The chart earns its keep when the individual changes matter as much as the total. A bar chart comparing two quarters tells you revenue grew; a waterfall tells you it grew despite churn because expansion more than covered it.
When not to use one
A waterfall chart implies that the categories on the x-axis are steps in a sequence that sum to the total. If your categories are just independent groups — sales by region, say — a bar or row chart is the honest choice, because there’s no meaningful running total to accumulate.
It’s also the wrong tool for continuous trends. If you want to see how a measure moves over many time periods, a line chart or a cumulative value chart shows the shape of the trend far better than a long march of waterfall steps. And a common misuse is stacking too many small components into the bridge: once you have fifteen tiny bars, the eye can’t track the running total anymore, and grouping minor items into an “other” step makes the chart legible again.
One more trap: because each bar floats at the height of the running total, readers can misjudge the size of individual changes. Labeling each bar with its value helps.
Waterfall charts in Metabase
Metabase has a native waterfall chart type. Point it at a breakout question — a category or time dimension plus a single measure — and it renders the increases and decreases in contrasting colors, with an optional total bar at the end. You can customize the colors for increases, decreases, and the total, and format the values on the y-axis.
Like other Metabase charts, waterfalls support drill-through, so clicking a bar lets you see the underlying records behind that particular step. On a dashboard, a waterfall sits comfortably next to other chart types and responds to the same filters, which makes it easy to show, for example, the revenue bridge for whichever segment a viewer picks. See the waterfall chart docs for the details.
Related terms
Further reading
Put it to work
- Churn rate — Metric
- Sales analytics — Overview
- Sales pipeline dashboard — Dashboard
