What Should a Small Business Dashboard Actually Show?
A useful dashboard doesn't need dozens of charts. Discover which information helps small business owners make decisions and how to avoid unnecessary reporting.
In this guideJump straight to what you need3 sections
A dashboard promises to show everything happening in your business.
You open it and find fifteen charts, several percentages and a collection of numbers that look important.
But after a few minutes, you're still not sure what needs your attention.
For a small business, the best dashboard isn't necessarily the one displaying the most information. It's the one that helps you make the next decision.
Start with the questions you ask every week
Business owners tend to return to a handful of practical questions.
How much work is coming in? Which jobs are unfinished? Are customers waiting for responses? What invoices are still outstanding?
The answers may currently be spread across several applications.
A booking system shows upcoming appointments. A CRM contains enquiries. Accounting software holds invoice information. Employees keep operational details in spreadsheets.
A dashboard can bring selected information together, but only if it has a clear purpose.
For example, a service business might benefit from seeing new enquiries, overdue jobs and appointments scheduled for the coming week.
A wholesaler may care more about outstanding orders, stock shortages and dispatch progress.
Neither business needs the same dashboard simply because both employ ten people.
Separate daily operations from long-term performance
Not every useful number belongs on the same screen.
An operational dashboard helps people manage work happening now.
It might show jobs requiring assignment, enquiries awaiting responses or tasks approaching their deadlines.
A management report serves a different purpose. It might examine revenue trends, average completion times or the number of customers returning over several months.
Combining everything into one screen can make both harder to use.
Consider a fictional Wellington cleaning business.
Its office administrator may need to see today's bookings, cancellations and unassigned jobs.
The owner may want a weekly view of completed work, outstanding invoices and customer demand.
Both views can use information from the same systems, but they answer different questions.
Designing around the user makes the dashboard easier to understand.
It also reduces the temptation to add charts merely because the data is available.
Make sure the numbers can be trusted
A dashboard is only as useful as the information behind it.
If employees update job statuses inconsistently, a chart of completed jobs may be misleading.
If customer records are duplicated across applications, enquiry counts may be inaccurate.
Before building a dashboard, define what each important measure means and where its information comes from.
Decide how frequently it needs to update.
Some figures may need to reflect changes almost immediately. Others might be perfectly useful as a daily or weekly summary.
The dashboard should also make exceptions easy to identify.
An overdue customer response may deserve more attention than a colourful chart showing hundreds of successfully completed actions.
A good starting point is to design the screen around three or four decisions people regularly make.
At Software Logic, we explore practical dashboards and reporting integrations that make existing business information easier to understand.
If you could open one screen tomorrow morning and immediately understand your business, what are the first three things it would need to tell you?
Have a question about your business? Talk to Liam.
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