Table is a good way to present large amount of data. However, with more than 5 columns, tables quickly become unreadable. If your data is changing in real time as you say it, the user most likely won't be able to make his decision in time if he had to look at 15 different columns at the same time.
Google knows best that the most important consideration when looking at a large amount of data is sorting. You need to sort by its relevance to user. Every piece of data may be important, but some piece of data are more important than the others, you need to identify which piece is the most important and which pieces are not, this heavily depends on the business' goal.
###Not all columns are created equal###
Some columns are more important than the other:
- some columns must be read first before data in another column becomes relevant. English speaking users reads from left-to-right, columns should be read left-to-right when possible;
- some columns are important only in their relative order, i.e. their absolute values don't really matter, e.g. date-time. You can hide this column, and use sorting to give the sense of order;
- some values are only important as high, medium, low. The small difference between two "high" values may not really affect decision-making by much since there are other factors that affects decision more significantly. You can use "green", "yellow", "red" icon instead of the full text to save space.
- some columns may be read-only, or need to be edited less often than some other, there are groups of columns that are very likely to be edited together. Sort your columns so that the columns that requires editing together is grouped together;
###Not all rows are created equal###
A very common mistake when sorting, is to sort by some useless arbitrary order, like alphabetic order or date or numerical values. Ordering that is static and consistent is useful if you need to search values, but you should let the computer do the searching for you. Instead, in most cases you'd want to order by its relevance.
Some of these may or may not apply in your case:
- recently updated data are more important;
- higher values transactions or transactions in a certain range of values are more important;
- false values or true values are not important;
- (more complicated) false values are important only when another field has a certain value, otherwise it's true value that is important
You need to identify these goals for your users, and and do a weighted sorting of your data and columns accordingly. If you have not identified which goals are the most important for your users, then you're not really designing. After you identify which data is most important, then you can proceed to hiding some of the less important datas, or abbreviating them, or abstracting them into icons. Icons are easy to absorb, and your user don't want to spend three seconds reading a 8221 and 1463 if he can spend one-tenth of second looking at "green circle" and "red cross".
###Some values are important only in certain context###
Highlight interesting values. The user may only be interested in transactions with a certain value in a certain field. And the user might know he'd never touch transactions which is too high or too low for his preference; you can filter them so the user does not even need to see them. You can even hide a whole column, if the user say he doesn't have a use for the column.