Dashboards are a really powerful way to present metrics and KPI’s in your business. As Accountants, we’re always looking for ways to synthesise data into relevant pieces of information. Dashboards are often better than pages and pages of financial information (numbers) as they’re more pleasing on the eye, and can highlight insight quicker than reading a row of data.
Business information is best analysed by dashboards in two ways:
- Historically - to find outliers over time, or growth over time
- vs Targets - to identify where you’re succeeding
Dashboards also allow you to pull non-financial information for analysis, including web-accessible information such as Facebook Advertising statistics. Using Dashboard tools we can easily compare Facebook Outreach to Online Sales of a product.
What's the Difference between a KPI and a Metric?
A KPI is a value that demonstrates your progress towards achieving your business objectives. Used at multiple levels of the business (Overall, Sales, Marketing, Operations etc) these can show whether you’re winning or losing the battle in each field.
The difference between a metric and a KPI is that a KPI has a specific target or objective. While a Metric will show you how much profit you made last month, a KPI will show you how this compares to your goals.
Many KPI’s fail to make it out of the Management Statements and have a positive impact on making business decisions. Rather than taken from an "KPI Menu" KPI’s should be built to reinforce your business objectives.
- Want to implement Dashboards and Metrics Analysis in your business?
- Don’t know your business objectives?