Small business dashboards: what to track and who should see it

In a lot of small businesses, someone spends part of every week building the same report. They export from the accounting system, copy from the booking tool, paste it all into a spreadsheet and tidy it up. By the time it’s finished, some of the figures are already out of date. A dashboard does that job automatically, but only if it shows the right things to the right people.

Start with the questions you already ask

The easiest way to choose what goes on a dashboard is to write down the questions people ask each week. How much did we sell? How many bookings are coming up? What stock is running low? Which jobs are overdue? Who hasn’t paid? Each regular question is a candidate for a figure on the dashboard. A figure nobody asks about is usually clutter, however interesting it looks.

It also helps to agree on definitions early. If the accounting system and the online store count a sale differently, the dashboard will show a number that nobody trusts. Settling what counts as a customer, a sale or an overdue job is often the most useful part of the whole exercise.

Give each role its own view

One dashboard for everyone tends to end up too crowded for anyone to use. Different people need different things:

• An owner usually wants a handful of headline figures, such as sales, cash owed and work booked ahead.
• A manager wants the detail behind their area: today’s jobs, who is doing what and what is running late.
• Front-line staff often need just one or two numbers that tell them what to do next, such as the next booking or the next order to pack.

Dashboards, reports and alerts

A live dashboard suits figures people check during the day. A scheduled report that arrives by email suits figures that are reviewed once a week or once a month, because nobody has to remember to look. An alert suits figures that only matter when they move past a limit, such as stock dropping below a reorder point or an invoice going unpaid past its due date. Most businesses end up with some of each.

Where the data comes from

Most businesses already collect the data a dashboard needs. It’s just spread across several systems. The work underneath a dashboard is usually bringing that data into one place, cleaning it up and keeping it refreshed, so the figures stay current without anyone touching them.

If someone on your team builds the same report by hand every week, a free assessment is a good place to look at whether it can be automated.