Dashboard reporting is a must have tool for managers and business owners. It collects all of the key performance indicators and the company’s important metrics in one easy to view and consume report - usually on one page.
Being able to access the KPI results of a business in real time allows for much greater agility in decision making. It ensures a more accurate approach can be applied when making longer term decisions.
Here are the top things you should consider when choosing a tool that is right for you and your business. Dashboard Reporting
What to include?
This will vary for each business, but there are some fundamentals that should be included. Financials are the first area that in theory should be fairly easy to include in a dashboard reporting. Often you can link your dashboard reporting directly to your cloud accounting software such as Xero and this will display your real time financial results such as revenue and expenses. #news
You can also include work in progress such as customer orders received, orders in progress, completed and deliveries. This can include the amount of stock on hand and business efficiency such as stock turnover, debtor days, creditor days and inventory days. Other business planning and goals such as business performance against a strategy or business goals or projects that are currently underway in the business.
Cashflow or burn rate is another important metric that you should have visibility over. A good dashboard report will show you how quickly you are burning your cash stockpiles and enable you to make the right decisions at the right time to stay on track.
Format
Once you have decided on the information that needs to be include you need to design a dashboard format that is easy to populate, easy to understand and analyse. Dashboard reporting should be visually appealing. It needs to be easy to look at and immediately gain an understanding of where the business is situated. Often your financial system will give you visually enhanced reporting, but if it doesn’t then you may need to export this to an excel spreadsheet where you can apply graphs and charts.
You also need to determine if you need weekly or monthly reporting. You should do monthly as a minimum, however, for some businesses it is going to be more effective to have weekly reporting. #news #dashboardreporting
Tools
There are a number of software tools on the market that will help you by automating much of the reporting. Some of them will interact with your existing software and they all vary in cost and usability. We suggest that you firstly identify what information you require and where that information is currently located before choosing the best tool that will meet your needs. The cost is also often based on the number of users, so you need to determine who will need to have access to the dashboard system on a regular basis.
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