What does it mean to have an effective business dashboard? A business dashboard is a visual representation of a company’s success in real time. How the company measures success is different for everyone. The purpose of a business dashboard is to see what is working for you business and what isn’t. Business Dashboards allow businesses to see that through KPI’s.

Here at Strategic Voyages we really take on the term client focused, “To the team at Strategic Voyages, it means from the very first time a prospective client or professional contact learns about our company we are dedicated to learning what we can do to help you reach your goals and then making it happen. Whatever goals you have, we’re here to make them become your reality.”  you can read about that here. Because we are so client focused it is easy for the SV business consultants team help create and implement dashboards for our clients.

Forbes says (Read the full article here.) there are 5 key benefits of a business dashboard here they are: First is Visibility. The visibility that a dashboard brings is important because it will give you a better understanding of what is happening in your company. You just might be focusing on the wrong part of your business when the most profitable is getting neglected. A real life example of this is Anthony T. Rossi. Rossi had started a fruit basket company. One day he discovered he was making more money selling the ugly fruit for juice than he was selling the fruit baskets. So his entire business model changed and he is now the starter of Tropicanna. Ongoing improvement if a dashboard is not constantly measuring how you spend your time and money, how can you improve. A dashboard gives the business owners the much needed metrics to compete in today’s environment. Time saving goes without saying, but here it comes anyways. When you know what you need to do to improve your company, instead of going through the tedious tasks of hiring people to tell you how your business is struggling or thriving. You can develop your plan on your own.  Judgement of performance to your plan is crucial. So you just created a plan and now you want to see if its working and this is where your business dashboard comes into play. Your metrics will be visible and you will be able to gauge if your plan is running on full steam or will still need modifications. Last but certainly not least is employee performance improves. Dashboards can measure how an employee is doing their job. This accountability drives productivity. Having the dashboard measure this is also almost certain you get the best employees doing the jobs that suit their needs best.

The two challenges that Forbes mentions in the article is that there are a lot of metrics to track for your business so finding the best one can take time and practice. The other challenge is actually building the dashboard. The dashboard requires an application programming interface, or you or an employee to type all the data in by hand, which is prone to mistakes.

Here are 4 simple steps to build a dashboard:

1. Start by identifying what program works best for you and your company. Popular examples include Excel, which is great if you are the only one managing your data. However, adding several users to Excel can be tricky. Google Sheets is another popular data manager where adding several users is much easier, but with all Google products wifi is required to do anything and if you work remote where there isn’t wifi that can be tricky. Apple’s numbers is the third option, which has a clean operating system, however has similar issues to Excel where adding users can be difficult. Also converting documents to Excel can also be time consuming.
2. After you have your software you need, the second step is to start identifying what data you want to start tracking. This could be sales, employees, expenses, literally anything that makes up a part of your company.  Now that you have your software and data, the third step is to compile the list of data into a list that can be leveraged.
3. After seeing this data, we can make the steps to get an outcome that is more desirable by reducing the “out to eat” expense.  The data also doesn’t have to be in a pie chart and if you prefer numbers that is okay.
4. Lastly, continuous improvement. This can happen by adding to the dashboard, removing items from the dashboard, or just changing your thinking. This part is the most important. Taking the data you have and making the modifications for it.

We know that creating an effective dashboard sounds simple, but can take years to master and fully utilize. That is where guidance from experts come in to help with which data to track and how to build the best dashboard possible. That is where we come in, we have created and implemented lots of business dashboards and we can help you too! If you want more information contact us today! We want to have a conversation.