As a business owner, you may appreciate the importance of monitoring key performance indicators but feel overwhelmed by the process—especially if you need to sign into to various applications to access a wealth of unconsolidated data.
A business dashboard provides an at-a-glance view of your business intelligence, so it’s quick and easy to make sense of your data in real time, whenever you like. Fully customisable, you can pick and choose which metrics you track to monitor business performance, including finances, customer behavior, and website analytics.
Here are a few more reasons to consider investing in a business dashboard.
Discover weak spots
When a business is performing well overall, problem areas can easily remain hidden. By reporting both historical and real time data, your business dashboard can alert you to a sudden drop in performance. As a result, you can reign in a problem before it can snowball, potentially avoiding disastrous results for a department or your entire organization.
Save time and money
A well-designed dashboard can reduce hours spent searching for data from multiple sources. Ease of data access, focusing on just one screen, means you may monitor your numbers more regularly. And with accurate, up to date information at your fingertips, you’ll make better decisions that can help you cut costs and improve your bottom line.
Improve sales performance
Gain valuable insight into key sales metrics, including the length of your sales cycle, your customer acquisition process, and customer behaviour—like which customers spend the most and buy the most often. By setting your dashboard to monitor these numbers, and flag any fluctuations, you’ll be empowered to take meaningful action to win more sales and maximize profits.
Understand the big picture
There are so many moving parts to operating a business, and often so much data available, it’s extremely challenging to make sense of what the numbers are telling you. A business dashboard can be customized to focus on key metrics you define, illustrating how they relate to the big picture, so you always have an accurate snapshot of your business.
Choosing the right dashboard
There are two main types of business dashboards. Analytical business dashboards are designed to provide historical and real time data to executives and senior leaders, to help improve company performance and set goals to achieve greater growth.
Operational dashboards, on the other hand, focus on the concerns of department managers and workers. These dashboards can help companies identify issues that, left untended, can become problems; employee performance metrics, for instance, can lead to better service and more efficient management of day-to-day operations.
Final tips
Business intelligence gleaned from your dashboard is invaluable for sorting through a wealth of data, providing the key info you need to make fact-based decisions for every aspect of your business. When shopping for the right business dashboard, be sure to look for a highly customizable solution designed to meet the needs of a small business.