8 business dashboards your company needs

As a business owner, it’s essential to have clear oversight across every part of your organisation.

But with so many demands on your time, this can be challenging and essential performance insights can be missed.

So, what if you could get an instant overview with easily understood performance statistics covering the major activities of your business?

Now you can; with business dashboards.

Business dashboards give you clear oversight across the whole of your company so you can be sure everything is running to plan. And if it’s not, they give you the insight to fix it.

Here are eight dashboards that would benefit any organisation.

For more ideas on how to analyse performance, check out our article on business intelligence tools.

1) Website analytics

When it comes to web analytics dashboards, Google Analytics is king. Not only is it the most popular web analytics platform, with millions of sites worldwide employing it to measure their stats, it’s also 100% free.

But with more than 500 different metrics accounted for, making sense of all that data and digging down to discover trends can be overwhelming.

However, because it’s so widely adopted, there are a plethora of resources available online to teach you how to use the tool.

Once you get to grips with it, creating custom Google Analytics dashboards is easy and enables you to select the metrics that are most relevant to your business and analyse them in one place.

It enables you to pull in metrics from different places and combine them to create a complete picture of how your website is performing.

2) CRM dashboards

Having a dedicated CRM system is essential for bringing visibility to your marketing activities and sales pipeline. The CRM builds a comprehensive picture of your prospects, as well as enabling instant oversight of sales team performance, sales forecasts, and reporting.

Hubspot is one of the easiest to use and best-supported CRM platforms on the market, even their free version has lots of features to get you started.

It provides up-to-the-minute data on your sales pipeline via an easy to understand, visual dashboard and gives you all the insights you need to coach your teams to success.

3) Financial reporting tools

Keeping a close eye on the finances in your business is integral to success and as an owner or director, you need instant, clear access to this information.

Which dashboard you choose will depend on the accounting platform you use but all the major accounting software providers also provide in-depth and clear dashboards, including Sage, Xero, and Quickbooks.

These give real-time transparency to cash flow, debtors, expenditure, and everything else you need to make better financial decisions.

4) Expense management dashboards

As great as accounting tools are, there are limitations. That’s where expense management dashboards come into their own.

Tools like Expensemate offer an end-to-end expense management solution that enables business owners to track and manage employee expense spend with precision and efficiency, due to the real-time transactional data that feeds from the card directly to the software.

This stream of data provides decision-makers with oversight of company-wide spending habits at any moment throughout the month, whether that be at an individual employee, department, or company level.

If administrators want to review historical records of previous months to monitor trends and highlight anomalies, they can do so with the data stored in one central repository.

5) Marketing analytics

Generating leads for your company is both an art and science, and there is no doubt the most successful marketing campaigns are data-driven. Keeping track of this data, particularly qualitative data about customer behaviour, can be a challenge.

But there are a variety of marketing dashboards available that can display marketing performance in easy-to-read visuals that track relevant custom metrics.

Whether you want a full marketing performance dashboard focusing on your conversion funnel, or you want to drill down into specifics such as social media, email marketing, or online spend, tools from big names such as Funnel, Klipfolio and GoodData can do this.

6) Sales performance dashboards

A comprehensive CRM will provide insights into sales performance but if you want to drill down even further into your sales data, a sales performance dashboard is the answer.

Platforms such as Dear Lucy integrate with your CRM, using core data to work out performance indicators that reveal how your sales teams are really performing.

Sales performance dashboards also display real-time sales forecasts, including expected monthly sales for the year. Compare this with your financial targets and you will always know if you are on course to achieve your commercial goals.

7) HR insights platforms

HR dashboards track qualitative data such as employee satisfaction and quantitative data such as recruitment success rates and employee turnover and retention.

This makes them an excellent tool for uncovering insights into whether your teams are made up of the right capabilities as well as highlighting potential gaps or problems.

PeopleInsight is an example of a platform that combines qualitative and quantitative data, enabling you to tailor your HR dashboard to your own business goals.

8) Strategy dashboards

Strategy dashboards give a top-level view of company performance and compares it to the strategic plan. These dashboards, such as this one created by ClearPoint, track movement towards specific business goals and the initiatives designed to meet those.

Unlike other dashboards on this list, strategy dashboards are not operational, but track and report on overall company progression.

They also enable c-suite executives to make insightful, data-driven decisions about the future direction of the organisation.

Business dashboards make for better decisions By adopting dashboards into your business, you will experience a new level of oversight that will revolutionise how you operate.

Cut down on unnecessary overheads, uncover opportunities before competitors, make better, data-driven decisions, and ultimately achieve real growth. Dashboards are the key to running your business in the best, most informed, efficient way you can.

Why stop at business dashboards? Discover more ways to level up your organisation with our tech stack article.