What Is Dashboard Reporting?


10/12/2021
Mark Donaldson

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Dashboard Reporting stops the monotonous combining and extracting of data that makes evidence-based decision making so costly, time-consuming and inaccessible.

"Dashboard reporting is a visual representation of your company’s key performance indicators (KPIs). Using data from other reports, dashboard visuals provide charts and graphs to give an at-a-glance vision of your company’s performance.” (www.salesforce.com)

I’m sure you’ve heard the buzzwords before… but what exactly is 'Dashboard Reporting' and how can it tangibly help you meet your business objectives?

Is it just another unnecessarily complex tool that presents data in pretty graphs? Any dashboard reporting tool that is excessively complex and hard to use is not a very good dashboard reporting platform…

It is essentially the industry-wide term used to describe what Roveel is… We’re talking about unlocking the true value of the data your accounting software is collecting and presenting it in the form of accessible insights. It is about empowering SMEs and accountants with accessible and accurate information that will help you make more informed decisions.

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Data dashboards enable companies to stop having to combine and extract thousands of excel pages of data and instead focus on understanding their data by generating evidence to support good decision making Let’s try this from another angle…

Every day we wake up and make a lot of decisions. Our goal as humans, is to make the best of those decisions as often as possible for our self-preservation and personal benefit: from what we wear and what we eat, to what time we wake up in the first place. A lot of these decisions in our daily lives are made using our well evolved “system 1” instincts without conscious thought. These are based on our present emotional state, our past experiences and previous decisions made.

In life there are inevitably those decisions that do require a more robust methodology: should I risk having that surgery? should I get a fixed rate or a variable loan? should my company invest in new machinery or recruit more staff? For these types of decisions, we like to get some information or evidence to help us feel confident that we are making the right decision. This is called ‘Evidence-based decision making.’

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One example of this evidence-based decision making in action is in our procedures for constructing buildings. Architects and engineers do not design structures based on their gut feelings and subjectivity. If this were to occur, a city landscape would likely be better placed in a post-apocalyptic movie than our reality.

As we all know, to avoid such a scenario, architects and engineers instead use evidence as a driver in their decision making for their designs. This is to prove that even before a single brick has been laid, the building will not collapse.

Data is really important... Potential market sizes, median incomes, and purchasing power metrics can be very intuitive pieces of information. On their own, these points are not concrete pieces of evidence to show that a company should (or should not) pursue a particular market. Only by combining all the available data and analysing it from a variety of perspectives are we able to uncover what the numbers are really telling us and what decisions should be made based on the evidence.

Never before has this data been more accessible to SMEs…

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Before things like data reporting, analytics & business intelligence tech, large companies with larger resources were employing teams of people to extract, format, combine and report on their data. The way this reporting system has worked for years is that when you have a question in mind for your data, you go through several steps. First, you open a complicated form, fill in some boxes and submit it to the system which in turn churns out a long report.

So you happily print out enough pages of paper to match the entire bibliography of Stephen King to highlight only three data points that are of any relevance to your original question. These three data points will then inevitably prompt a new question from management and so the cycle repeats.

The real problem is that companies using this model spend most of their time compiling the data rather than utilising the potential of that information in their decision making.

This is where dashboard reporting comes in…

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Dashboard reports are a class of software tools that are designed to make that extraction and combining of data instant and automatic. Fast and reliable reporting tools remove that entire process, enabling decision-makers to focus on understanding their data rather than managing it.

If you want to focus on an area of interest, you just click it, if you want to understand the details that summarise the value, you just expand it with a single touch. If you want to present a single conclusion using a powerful graphic, you can generate it in a second without having to churn out individual reports every hour.

The potential for the technology is huge! Data is really important and Dashboard reporting levels the playing field between bootstrapped SMEs and large corporates with seemingly infinite resources to compete.

Programs like Roveel, dashboards for Sage, stops the monotonous combining and extracting of data that make evidence-based decision making so costly, time consuming and inaccessible.

Roveel is a business dashboard tool built for Sage. We design and create bespoke dashboards for your business and you provide our out of the box dashboards too. We offer a free trial.

This is a service that has endless limitations. What filters and dashboards would you like at your fingertips?