Track, Analyze, Achieve: How Dashboard Monitoring Can Guide Your Business to Success
Understanding your business’ performance is essential to making the immediate improvements necessary for the future. More often than not, the expanse of data available to managers leads itself to few real insights. However, there is a way to utilize your company’s financials to bring clarity to the key metrics that drive performance. The dashboard brings this data into one concise page for monitoring and on-going cumulative analysis. This is useful in tracking not only how revenues are changing, but also in seeing where these revenues are coming from, how customers are trending by industry segment, and what new opportunities can be capitalized on.
Dashboards take advantage of the relevant charts and graphs that greatly improve the visibility of the underlying numbers. One example is looking at how this year’s gross profit margin is tracking comparative to forecasts. A customized dashboard can do this with a gauge chart, allowing for intuitive analysis to see whether your company is hitting its goal number. The ability to quickly view multiple key charts can allow management to quickly see what’s going on, and make more efficient decisions. An example of this is seeing that GPM is not reaching target forecasts, but then looking at the chart next to it and seeing exactly where costs have gone up, allowing your company to implement changes that typically would not happen until a quarterly or annual review.
Dashboard use leads to improved decision making because the areas needing adjustment are now visible. Simply diving into the details of the current financials lacks both a time perspective and focus point. A dashboard provides these benefits in a clear and intuitive manner, allowing managers to see the big picture of what is going on and understand where to look closer into the financials. By utilizing a dashboard, it serves as a reference point for where go in further analysis, and what direction to focus toward for future strategies. Without the use of a dashboard, management risks not spotting small negative trends before they become larger and more significant issues.
Simply put, the value of having a dashboard lies in being able to look at the visuals and see: where to shift focus (reaching out to new and growing customer segments), where “lean” business practices can be implemented (cutting costs and increasing GPM), and overall how to take full advantage of the financial numbers and use to them to improve your business’s success.
Contact us to learn how our dashboard monitoring can help your business.