No matter where you work as a finance expert – at a large and well – established company or in a small startup business, you will be generating financial reports.
Generating these reports is tedious work especially when you are relying on spreadsheets. Further, understanding the implications of the generated report presents yet another challenge.
The key to making sound decisions with the aid of financial reports is having clear, accurate, and up-to-date information. On top of that, financial dashboards come in handy as well.
With financial dashboards, the management is presented with information that is needed for the practical implementation of strategies. It gives you a complete picture of your business promoting transparency and profitability.
Financial dashboards are reports that illustrate key pieces of data in a graphical format. They allow easier interpretation of data and ensure it is readily shared. With it, information can be accessed by anyone with permission to view the dashboard for easier collaboration.
Why are financial dashboards important?
- Dashboards allow you to visualize data
Financial dashboard enables decision makers such as finance experts to analyze deeper and to understand performance metrics better through insightful graphs and visual representations that makes it easy to determine appropriate action. Likewise, it is easier to process information using graphs to visualize large amounts of complex data than poring over spreadsheets.
- Dashboards define business’ success
Creating a financial dashboard enables groups to settle on decisions about what they perceive as the business’ needs and measures of success. Dashboards guarantee that everybody in the business knows about what the present needs and indications of success are.
- Dashboards enhance productivity
There are many companies that spend considerable time searching for data from varying sources because they need help in understanding the figures better. A lot of time is spent just validating figures and ensuring they make sense.
With a financial dashboard, figures are always drillable so that investigation of what lies behind them takes no time. This saves a lot of staff time and increases overall productivity.
Tips in Creating a Dashboard
Here are some tips in creating your financial dashboard:
- Create a dashboard that you can maintain
Creating a dashboard can either be through Microsoft Excel or through a specialized software. Instead of over-designing your dashboard, sort out a tool that will be easy for you to use and maintain as it grows because as the business grows in revenue and complexity, so will the complexity of maintaining dashboards.
- Create a clean and predictable dashboard
Many dashboards incorporate a lot of colors, diagrams, and even fonts. Inconsistent use of these will draw an eye on variety of directions and will confuse the audience as to what they represent on your dashboard.
- Choose the most essential metrics
It is important to just choose the metrics that are most relevant and useful to your objectives. It is also important to be specific in recognizing which one should you add to your dashboard. Ensure that each thing ought to support your objectives and will serve as a main pointer of progress toward that objective.
- Keep it up-to-date and accurate
Decide the time allotment for your dashboard updates – it can be hourly, daily, weekly or monthly. This will depend upon the way your business works and the accessibility of information.
It doesn´t have to always be on the second information rather whatever is shown must be adequately time delicate to be really relevant for surveying whatever you have measured.
Better Financial Reporting
Finance teams are expected to collate information from various units and then consolidate these in order to come up with relevant reports and a concrete budget plan. This process has traditionally been tedious and rather unhelpful because it gives them a one dimensional perspective of the information.
With the help of a financial dashboard, whether built manually through excel or through a specialized software, it is becomes easier to consolidate the data naturally and visualize costs, benefits, and income. Subsequently, it becomes easy to track the overall business progress against its set goals.
If you are looking for ways to build a better dashboard for your organization, visit www.performancecanvas.com or email [email protected] to see a demo of the dashboard capabilities of our solution.
DSPanel offers cutting edge technology platform for business analytics, planning, and visualization. DSPanel designs, builds, and operates with the end users in mind. Performance Canvas was created by DSPanel to answer the unarticulated needs of the market not addressed by previous available solutions. With Performance Canvas, information is transformed into valuable business insights for the business executives to utilize in their decision-making process. DSPanel currently has over 2500 organizations deploying their solutions.
