Why Dashboards?

While working with small businesses, I realized that most do not have business metrics to guide them. Often, organizations focus too much on sales ignoring things that make it happen. I, therefore, decided to write about 100 different metrics that organizations can choose. There are some conventional measurements in it. But, most of them are small yet critical things that we ignore. The idea was to provide owners with a spectrum of metrics. They could choose the right ones for their business from it.

Next, it is vital to create dashboards so that all the results are visually available to make meaningful inferences. Some of the benefits of having a dashboard are:

1. Visibility: They make things easy to comprehend, analyze, and take timely actions. For example, by knowing how your last marketing campaign faired, you can make necessary changes to the next one.

2. Saves time: One of the reasons people give up on business performance reporting is the time consumed in compiling them. However, with simple tools available in Google Sheets, dashboards can be automated. They save a ton of time and make the process super-efficient.

3. What is measured gets managed: This is an old adage. But it still has its relevance. It greatly helps improve the business performance. I use Quickbooks to manage my business account. It has an excellent dashboard that makes it easy to review things in one glance.

4. Increases productivity: Small businesses need to manage their resources optimally. Dashboards focus on the critical elements of a business. It helps the owners channelize their energies to essential tasks instead of spreading them over many trivial ones.
   

I have provided many metrics in this series. If bundled into categories, they include:

1. Financial Parameters

2. Sales Performance

3. Marketing Metrics

4. Human Resource related measurements

5. Customer Relationship metrics

6. Operations

7. Supplier relations

8. Cost Management

Therefore, in this final article of the Big Small Metrics Series, I urge you to put together your business dashboard using the relevant metrics. If you need any help in doing that, please feel free to send an email to me at subodh.subsay@gmail.com

Metrics:

1. Put together your business dashboard today.

• Subodh

PS: You may sign-up to my new series of blogs by clicking here. In the new series, I am going to crunch a whole management book into pictures on a single page!