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This graph was an entry for the ...
Business Intelligence Network 2006 Data Visualization Competition

The contest was organized & judged by Stephen Few (he was the 
organizer & judge of the DM Review contest last year, which 
SAS won the dashboard competition).

This particular graph is for Question/Scenario #1 ...

For this chart, I chose a simple bar chart, with a short dark line segment.
The bar represents the actual amount spent that month, and the line
represents the amount budgeted.  

If the amount spent is higher than the amount budgeted, then the bar is
colored pink.  If it's > 20% over budget, then the bar is red.  This 
draws attention to the bars that are over budget, especially the ones
that are *way* over budget.  (Underbudget bars are green, and incomplete
month are left uncolored.)

By plotting the individual monthly numbers (rather than summarizing them)
you are able to see trends and variances easily.  For example, the 
Executive dept tends to be over budget, and the Technical Support 
department tends to be under budget, whereas some of the other 
departments fluctuate between over & under budget.  You can also
see things like the Accounting department was over budget for the past
5 months, but only/just barely (the bars are so close to the target
marks that you couldn't tell they were overbudget except that the
bars are pink).

An alternative way would have been to convert each number to a percentage,
but that makes it harder to get a feel for exactly what the budget amounts
are (by independently scaling each chart, you get the same visual effect
as converting all numbers to %'s, so I think I've got the best of both
worlds :)

I arranged the charts such that the ones with the highest $$ amounts 
are at the top, assuming that might be the most important ones to 
someone analyzing the budget.  (I thought about putting the ones 
that were the most over-budget at the top, but in the long-term that
might change the order each time the report is run, and make it 
hard to compare graphs from month-to-month).

I thought about putting the color legend on a separate page, but 
since it's not intuitive that the color-break from pink to red is
at the 20% over-budget, I thought it's probably important to go ahead
and include it on this page (also white-space was easily available at 
the top/left corner, so I thought I'd go ahead and utilize that).

And one little detail - I put a thin gray outline around the bars.
Otherwise the light-color bars blend in too much with the background.

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