Should You Have a Financial Dashboard?

A quick glance is all you need to check your fuel gauge, speed limit, engine temperature, and RPM when you’re driving down the road. Your car’s dashboard is designed to focus you on what’s important and what you need to know to have a safe trip.
 
Your car’s dashboard items, if they applied to business, would be called key performance indicators or KPIs. Unlike a car, the KPIs of your business vary depending on your business goals and what’s important to you. Common ones might include your cash balance, how fast you get paid, how much revenue is coming in, and whether you're making a profit.

There are literally hundreds of them to choose from, and many of them are not derivable from your financial statements, such as number of orders, client satisfaction levels, and employee turnover. 
 
Would it be useful to have a dashboard of KPIs for your business so you can know what’s working and get alerted to what needs focus? Here are the steps to creating a dashboard for your business:
 

1. Decide on the KPIs you want to track.  Selecting 6-10 to create and track is a good place to start. 
2. Select a tool that will provide you with the KPIs in the format you desire. There are many great add-ons to your accounting software that will instantly crunch the financial KPIs for you and present them in insightful formats, including charts, graphs, dashboards, and reports.
3. Create any new processes to calculate the new KPIs and get them entered into the dashboard app.
4. Hold a review meeting to go over the KPIs and determine any action based on the review. 

 
There are many great KPIs available right in your accounting system, which might be plenty to get started with. And there are some real gems outside your accounting system that will take a bit of work to calculate. In any case, we can help you through this process.  Feel free to reach out to us any time to discuss the possibilities of having a dashboard in your business.   

This is general information and should not be acted upon without first determining its application to your specific situation. Please contact us, your CPA or tax adviser for additional details.