Your sales are in the accounting book, your orders in the website panel, your stock in an Excel file and your cash in the bank app. You know each of these numbers on its own, but you’ve never seen them side by side.
A management dashboard puts those numbers next to each other on one page, so that one glance tells you which part of your business is working and which has fallen behind.
Put only a few numbers on the dashboard
Nobody looks at a dashboard with thirty numbers on it. Pick four or five, the ones that would change your decision if they went up or down. If a drop in customers who buy from you again would make you move your advertising budget, that number belongs on the dashboard. But if your Instagram follower count doesn’t change any decision, it doesn’t belong there.
Next to each number, write last month’s figure and its target
A number on its own tells you nothing. If you had 120 new customers this month, you can’t tell whether that’s good or bad until you know how many there were last month and how many there were meant to be. So your dashboard is a simple table with four columns: the name of the number, this month’s figure, last month’s figure and its target.
Set each number’s target in advance. In goal setting I said that a goal without a number and a date never tells you whether you reached it, and the target column on your dashboard does exactly that job.
Give every number a fixed source and one person responsible
Next to each number, write down exactly where it’s read from, for example sales from the accounting software and repeat customers from the website panel. If you read the same number from a different place each month, the months can’t be compared with each other.
Don’t fill in the dashboard yourself either. Make one person on your team responsible for filling in the numbers, say every Saturday morning, so all you do is read it and decide.
An Excel file or a Google Sheet is enough to start with. Dashboard software only becomes worth it once you’ve filled in this table regularly for a few months and know which numbers you actually use.
How to read the dashboard
Say you run an online clothing shop and you’ve been filling in your dashboard for three months. Your new customers have gone up a little each month, but the number of customers who buy from you again has fallen from 80 a month to 50.
If all you had was a general sense that things had slowed down, you’d probably have raised the advertising budget to bring in new customers. The dashboard shows the problem is keeping your existing customers, and your money should go into bringing them back.
The dashboard tells you which number has fallen behind, but not why. To find the reason, look at the more detailed numbers in that same area. If repeat customers have dropped, for instance, check whether their orders arrived later, whether their complaints went up, or whether your prices rose above a competitor’s. In how to find where your business’s real problem is I walked through how to do this step by step.
And if you’re not sure which numbers to put on your dashboard, in a free diagnostic session we will choose them together.