If you have been following my four part series on your Financial Dashboard, you are ready to think about the information that you want to receive and when and how to generate the reports.
In our first example, the entrepreneur received a set of financial statements on the 15th of the following month – a fairly typical situation but all of that information is historical and out of date (i.e., the executive cannot affect January’s results with information received on February 15th.)
The second executive received information about last week on Monday morning and although he cannot impact last week’s results (an argument perhaps for daily dashboard reporting) he can affect the rest of this month’s results.
Selecting the right metrics (measurements) is a difficult, but important part of this process.
You don’t want to have too many key metrics that you are tracking on any given dashboard – I recommend no more than five or six and always weigh the cost of tracking and measuring the information against the value received there from.
Finally, a dashboard will likely change over time and as a key pressure or challenge in your company is resolved, that metric may be removed from the dashboard and another that is now a higher priority selected to replace it.
If you long for timely and more accurate information about your business and to become a confident and proactive decision maker, I suggest that you make the investment to implement dashboards and key metrics reporting for your business. If properly planned and executed, it will be a journey of discovery and insight that will pay dividends well into the future.
In the next post of my four-part series I’ll identify five basic rules for the metrics you need to incorporate into your financial dashboard plan. If you’re ready to get your financial dashboard set up, Give us a call right away.
Tags: Financial Dashboard, Utah CEO, Utah CFO