How often do you find yourself in this situation?
You send an email to your accounting team to ask for a report – or several. You’re looking for answers to important questions – but you often end up asking for data that you then have to wait for while someone pulls a report for you – sometimes from multiple different systems – then pulls that together into an Excel workbook, and sends it your way.
Often, the report you receive simply raises more questions. So you go back and ask for more information. And wait again. And then try to piece together the information you need from what you have – and by that time, it’s outdated.
Sound familiar?
What if we turned this process around, and you were able to log into your own web portal and access the information you needed, specific to your job, that was designed to answer your most common questions quickly?
For example – you might want to know what your sales trends are over your various lines of business. That trend graph could be front and center on your dashboard, updated in real-time.
Maybe you regularly need to know what your department’s remaining budget is, including all your open purchase orders. A dashboard component showing your actuals to date, open PO’s, and available budget might be just the thing.
Or how about answering the question, “which of my vendors am I doing the most business with across all my locations?”
If you are in the C-Suite, maybe there are certain key performance indicators that are important to you. Shouldn’t you have access to them when you want them, rather than waiting for a monthly report to be emailed after the month has closed?
If you think about the types of data you need in order to better manage your business, what would your ideal dashboard look like?
