Dashboards: Insights to drive output
Dashboards can close the gap between financial records and powerful business insights.
Managing financial information can be overwhelming for most small business owners. Doing it yourself is time consuming, and often business owners don’t understand their financial results until the accountants are done with their files. This might be weeks after month end or even months after year-end. Small businesses have little chance of survival with these response times.
We are living in a fast-paced world that requires business owners to not only have quick access to their accounts, but also have them presented in a useful and meaningful way so that they can monitor their business and take the necessary actions for their business to survive and thrive.
Boost your business - close the gap between financial records and business insights.
First. Ensure you have quick access to your accounts. Select a bookkeeper that provides a cost effective, simple online solution so you have real time access to your financials.
Second. Select a bookkeeper that understands your business and your goals, and who can provide a Business Dashboard to help you monitor your business.
What is a Business Dashboard?
Simply put, it is a visual tool that consolidates and displays important financial and non-financial metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) for your business.
At a glance, a Business Dashboard offers the user an array of important business insights to help manage your business and make fact-based decisions, set performance goals and proactively identify opportunities and highlight problems.
Why would you need a Dashboard?
- You sense that your company could be improving, but you have no idea how to tell for sure — or figure out exactly how you could be improving. Like many decision makers you don’t know what data you should be collecting or where to get it.
- Maybe you are already gathering and monitoring information you think is meaningful, but “Now what?” How do you make sense of it and what do you do with it to make a difference in your business?
- Your competitors are leaving you behind – they always one step ahead of you. Maybe you are losing old customers or new deals because your competitors can offer something you can’t?
The right dashboard can help you stay informed, relevant, competitive and alive.
How can a Business Dashboard benefit your business?
A Business Dashboard makes your business easy to understand. It combines financial and other information to provide objective, valuable insights into your business, and enables you to make decisions to chase growth opportunities and manage your costs and risks.
1. It gives you the Big Picture
An effective dashboard provides a complete snapshot of every important metric the user needs to make informed decisions, including real-time metrics and key performance indicators from multiple sources.
2. It provides an objective view of performance
Dashboards provide an easy to understand, objective view of current performance and can effectively serve as a basis for further discussions.
3. It reveals opportunities and identifies problem areas
Powerful dashboards not only report historical and real-time data, they also offer insight into opportunities and identify possible problem areas, so you can act proactively. Users of dashboards often feel empowered, make better decisions, jump on opportunities quickly and handle difficult problems at the source as they arise.
4. It drives real-time, fact based decision making
Dashboards help users easily understand and evaluate complex data- which drives fact based, real-time decision making.
5. Helps people perform better
Data is one of the most valuable assets your business has. Gathering it and understanding it is often time-consuming and costly. A well-designed dashboard makes data valuable and can give you and your team insights that help them to do their job better.
6. Saves time
Business dashboards consolidates information in one easy to read format, saving you the time and frustration of digging through data.
