What Is a Waterfall Chart?
A waterfall chart (also called a bridge chart) shows how a sequence of positive and negative changes connects a starting value to an ending value. Each step is a floating bar: it starts where the previous bar ended, and rises or falls by its own amount — increases typically colored green, decreases red, with totals shown as full bars anchored to zero.
The name comes from the visual effect: the bars cascade down (or up) the page like water finding its level, and thin connector lines link the top of one bar to the base of the next, making the running total visible at every step.
What It's Used For
Anywhere a change needs to be explained, not just reported. A single number — "profit was $2.1M this quarter" — doesn't tell you why. A waterfall chart answers that:
- P&L bridges — starting revenue, minus cost of goods, minus operating expenses, plus one-time gains, equals net profit. Standard in finance reporting.
- Budget variance — starting budget, plus/minus each variance driver, equals actual spend.
- Headcount bridges — starting headcount, plus hires, minus attrition, equals ending headcount.
- Year-over-year decomposition — starting revenue, plus new customer revenue, minus churned revenue, plus expansion revenue, equals ending revenue.
In every case, the value of the chart is in the decomposition — showing which individual factors drove the change, not just what the change was.
What a Good Waterfall Chart Needs
- Automatic running totals — each bar's floating position should be calculated from the cumulative sum, not manually positioned.
- Distinct coloring for increases, decreases, and totals — totals (start and end, and any subtotal checkpoints) are usually full bars anchored to zero, visually distinct from the floating increase/decrease bars.
- Connector lines — thin horizontal lines linking consecutive bars make the cascade readable; without them the chart is just a set of disconnected floating bars.
- Clear labeling — since the whole point is explaining a change, each bar typically needs its value labeled directly rather than relying on hover.
Waterfall Pro for Power BI
Waterfall Pro turns a sequence of increases and decreases into a clean bridge between a start and end total, with flat connectors and color-coded steps — built specifically for P&L bridges and variance analysis.
Add a category field for your bridge steps and a measure for the amount, and the visual calculates the running total, colors increases and decreases automatically, marks start/end as full bars, and draws the connectors between steps.
Getting Started
- Add the visual from AppSource.
- Drag your step categories (e.g. Revenue, COGS, OpEx, Net Profit) into the category field.
- Drag your amount measure into Values — increases and decreases are colored automatically, with totals rendered as full bars.
- Format bar colors, connector style, and labels in the Format Pane to match your report.
If you need to explain a change rather than just report it, a waterfall is the chart built for exactly that — and Waterfall Pro gets you there without manually calculating cumulative positions.