Glossary
What is a dashboard?
One screen on which you see the most important figures of your business at a glance, often as a chart, table or number. The figures come from your programs and are kept up to date, so you do not have to calculate them yourself. Such an overview screen is called a dashboard.
In practice
What it means for your SME
The name comes from the instrument panel of a car: you glance at it and know whether all is well. A dashboard in a company does the same. It shows how things stand, without you having to page through reports or spreadsheets.
A good dashboard answers one question. The sales dashboard answers: what is in the pipeline and what has to happen this week? The customer service dashboard: how many questions are open and how fast do we answer? If you want both questions on one screen, it quickly becomes cluttered. Make a dashboard per role instead.
What belongs on it are your KPIs: the few figures that show whether you are on course. A chart makes a trend visible, a number a current position and a table a list of actions. Choose the form that answers the question best, and leave out the rest. Every extra block makes the dashboard slower to read.
The quality of a dashboard depends on the data beneath it. If the CRM is not kept up to date, the dashboard shows nice but incorrect figures. That is why we always start a report at the set-up: which fields, which stages and who fills them in. Only then do we build the screens.
Many programs have a dashboard of their own. If you want to combine figures from several programs, you need a tool that collects and shows data. That is the field of business intelligence. With Zoho that is Zoho Analytics. An overview of all Zoho apps is on our Zoho page.
Want to work this out for your company?
Tell us how it runs today. We will tell you what a compact first step looks like.