Do you have a business dashboard set up for your business? What are some tips that worked out for you when building a functional dashboard? In Money Talk – episode 1, our founder, W.Michael.Hsu shared what features a good dashboard should have. And how can you use it to help your business. Let’s tune-in !
Topic – What Do I Need to Know to Build A Dashboard
Why we need a dashboard
There are so many things going on the marketplace which means a lot of noise in entrepreneurs’ world. A dashboard can really help entrepreneurs focus on the things that are important. So What makes a good dashboard, and what are the differences between a financial dashboard and traditional financial statements.
What makes a good dashboard?
Easy-to-understand and consumable data
Again, the purpose of a dashboard is to keep you focusing on the right thing and change your behavior day to day. A good dashboard can provide the information you need a glimpse. It doesn’t involve a lot of technology or techniques.
An Example of consumable data
In DeepSky, we have four screens on the wall. Every time we walk by the wall, we’ll see our dashboard. One of the dashboards is what we call daily 808 spreadsheets. There’s no such high-tech behind it. It’s just a google spreadsheet (you can see it in the video). On this sheet, you can see our each team members name and their Top one priority for today. By the end of the day, we’ll mark the cells to show the status of our top one priority. If there are a lot of greens, it means that the company is on the track. If it’s yellow, we probably have a slight issue, need to discuss with the team. Red means we run into some issues that need to be fixed.
Traditional financial statements v.s financial dashboard
Unlike traditional financial statement, it should contain too many information. It only shows the information that you need to change your behavior, and the data has to be consumable, not a bunch of the numbers that you don’t understand.
3 key takeaways before building your own financial dashboard
- Keep it simple
- Easy to understand
- Be actionable
In the next episode, we’ll talk about other features of the dashboard. Stay tuned!
