IMPORTANCE OF A CEO DASHBOARD

Also listen to our podcasts on Spotify: or Apple Podcasts:

As the leader of your organization, you are faced with a number of decisions every day, and these decisions will impact the business and the team you lead. Therefore, as the CEO, it’s important to regularly keep your eye on key information. This will allow you to stay on top of the business and provide you with accurate data that allows you to make important decisions. A well-defined CEO Dashboard will help you do this.

A CEO dashboard visualizes your business data and tracks the health of your business by measuring revenue trends, growth, and operational cash flow. For many CEOs, their dashboard is a window into understanding the daily operations and growth of their business. By having daily high-level visibility into the business, I was able to pinpoint areas of improvement and drive action based on data I was receiving.

The main purpose of your dashboard is to offer a visual display of all your key data and provide information at a glance. Dashboards provide in-context information into business performance; with this data at hand, your decision-making will be improved. Obviously, based on the nature of your company, your dashboard will be somewhat unique and will cover different areas.

A good dashboard communicates the most important information for the CEO in a simple, easy-to-understand visual format. Typically, it will sit on its own page and receive information from a linked database. They are structured to reflect a logical information hierarchy and provide you with the option of drilling down into departmental data when necessary. It’s important the dashboard covers a 12-month history so you can analyze how items are changing over time positioning you to make any necessary changes quickly.

BENEFITS TO BUILDING YOUR OWN DASHBOARD

The main benefit of a dashboard is that it allows you to continually improve on your organization. Other benefits include:

Total Visibility into Your Business

When running a business, you receive information and data from a varied number of sources – including finance, sales, marketing, banks, and other business units. While all this data may be useful, it does not allow for useful comparison if not linked correctly. A CEO dashboard visually displays all your data.  Not only can you access it, but you can also run more detailed reports to get information and numbers without taking the time to calculate it yourself, which is a tedious and time-consuming process.

Considerable Savings

Without access to accurate data, even seasoned CEOs would have a difficult time making thoughtful, accurate decisions. Bad decisions can cost the business a lot of money and time. A well-developed dashboard will provide you with better visibility and better information to help you make better decisions.

Improved Results

Within your organization you have various goals, and strategies to meet those goals. It becomes difficult to track, however, when you don’t have fast access to data. A CEO dashboard will provide visual representation of where teams and departments are in relation to their goals, which will allow you to make any adjustments before challenges arise.

Reduced Stress

As a CEO, you can spend a considerable amount of time gathering information from different sources, including spreadsheets, website analytics, reports, etc.  This could potentially lead to inaccurate insights and information, which costs you time and effort. A CEO dashboard visually displays all the data you require in one place so you can gain insight into the overall performance of the business.

Increased Productivity

Dashboards are a useful communication tool because it becomes easy to see how each department and the organization as a whole is performing. Consistent, accurate data is essential to employee, departmental, and organizational success.

Increased Profits

Your dashboard shows you exactly which areas of your business are performing well, and which ones are performing poorly. Once you know where you need to make improvements, it becomes clear where to focus time, energy and resources to improve results and your bottom line.

Creating a CEO dashboard doesn’t have to be difficult. With the right data sources and tools in place, you can get from minimal insights to a quickly accessible display of Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and business metrics.

Here is a list of metrics you can consider including in your CEO Dashboard.  Find which ones work best for you and your business!

1. Goal – Every business has goals, and many of these goals include a dollar amount. Having this metric at the top of your dashboard will keep you focused. Add an indicator bar to quickly determine the progress of reaching each goal.
2. Progress Report – This is important for each significant project.
3. Budget – It’s important to know what your budget is for a single project or for the complete organization. Make sure you compare actual expenditures to your budget as well within this metric.
4. Accounts Receivable Aging List – It’s good to have one place where you can see everyone who owes you money and the age of debt.   The schedule should include the number of days past due.
5. Accounts Payable Aging List (including debt) – It’s good to have one place where you can see everyone you owe money to.   The schedule should highlight any obligation you need to pay and how long it’s been waiting for payment.
6. Expenses – In direct correlation with tracking dollars coming into the business, it’s also best practice to measure outward expenses as well. This might also be found in the overall budget metric.
7. Total Profit/Loss – In this chart, you can see at a high-level all your numbers from new sales revenue, upsell revenue, customer churn, and profit. This could potentially cover a variety of the options listed above in one chart.
8. Growth – This should show the exact dollar amount and percent of revenue growth.
9. Cash Flow Report – Show a minimum of six months out (12 months is preferred) of how much cash is being generated in relation to how much is spent in exact numerical values.
10. Gross Sales – Quickly visualize the growth of your revenue month-over-month in relation to the previous fiscal year.
11. Overhead Report –This report would break down your monthly overhead in main categories. Each month, as you make decisions that change overhead (likely increasing), you can see an accurate depiction of what it costs to run your business effectively. Have this report reflect at least 12 months history so you can be mindful of how your overhead is changing.
12. Annual Recurring Revenue / ARR – This is the amount of money that comes in every year for the duration of a customer’s annual contract.   ARR trends over time are the measured growth of ARR over the course of your company’s foundation.
13. Churn Rate – This is sometimes known as an attrition rate. This is the percentage rate at where your customers stop doing business with you. This can be a valuable tool to help you if a pattern starts to emerge from the churn rate.
14. Cost Accounting – Develop a way where when you budget for a project you not only know your variable cost, but you also can determine your overhead allocation and net margin.

ACTION STEPS

As the leader of your organization, you will continue to face a number of decisions every day. Keeping critical information at the center of your thinking will help guide you in making better decisions.

As you use your CEO Dashboard, continue to make modifications until it captures all the necessary information. Paying attention to the details will allow you to identify trends as soon as they start.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and I hope you found it useful. Your feedback is important. I would like to hear your thoughts on this topic. Please share your thoughts in the comments section.