We're a fast growing tech start-up and want a tool that pulls our financial, salesforce, and analytics data. We'd like the data real time and in the cloud so we can give access to execs, investors, and some employees (permission based). I'm 1.5 weeks into a free trial of KPIdashboard. They're probably robust enough to pull all of our data but they're very unresponsive. I'd like to have them set up the initial dashboard (I'm so overloaded with other work) and then train me how to maintain. No response from my "dedicated" rep in over a week. I also looked at Klipfolio but not robust or intuitive enough. Any other ideas?
What is the best cloud based KPI dashboard tool?
Answers
For an on line biz like BlogFrog, you'll probably want something that 1 -can pull in on line web activities born in the cloud (social media listening/monitoring tool, looks like you have in place already), your web analytics (top blogger activities, affiliate tracking, email campaign stuff, live chat, etc.customer behaviors on your site, etc.) as well as pull in your transactional data base (Salesforce, ERP, billing systems) for analyzing your top customers so that you can treat VIPs well, and reduce churn and correlate it to the rest of the data collected. It turns out my company Anametrix in San Diego does this for its customers - as one example, a customer created a dashboard to track KPIs, pulling in their billing system to analyze churn and growth, their live chat vendor, their CRM, their email campaign vendor, their social listening tool, and their web analytics vendor. Anametrix also does web analytics and social listening as well, but if you have those vendors in place, then we simply hook up to the data.
Each vendor approaches the analytics and KPI problem a bit differently, I would be happy to share the competitive landscape further- there are probably 40 firms that do parts of what you're looking for.
I'll publish a more generic paper on
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Danielle, regardless of dashboard tool chosen, this
"Five Key Performance Indicators For Greater Financial Success"
https://www.proformative.com/whitepapers/five-key-performance-indicators-greater-financial-success
It's geared to professional services, but is a nice look at the possible granularity of various KPIs possible.
Best... Sarah
We have a client who is examining www.idashboards.com for use with NetSuite. I am not sure of how reputable any of these dashboards solutions are.
I agree that Adaptive Planning has a great integrated system, incorporating actual results in comparison with Plan or Forecast for both financial reporting, financial statements, and dashboards. While a separate software system (offered over the cloud), it was built to integrate with NetSuite, but it now integrates or accepts Actual data from almost all ledger systems. Certainly would recommend you take a look at this option before committing to anything else.
Hi Danielle,
We have many satisfied companies that are using Birst. Birst is also a SaaS solution. Similar to your needs, our existing clients are pulling from salesforce, ERPs, and other databases into Birst. The system is definitely robust enough.
There is another Saas solution called Host Analytics. Host Analytics is used for Financial Analysis. They have a feature called DecisionHub which pulls KPIs and Financial Drivers from multiple trusted sources. This tool 1)assists with setup 2)provides you the ability to benchmark against other companies. There is demo available at: https://www.proformative.com/company/host-analytics hope this helped!
Colleen
Looking at a (cloud) KPI dashboard (tool) is half the story told, at best.
Sure, you have to see figures to manage these.
In order to manage your business you should think of integrating planning and forecasting, early.
Along with the already mentioned handling of specific functionality to match demand and supply, pricing strategies, etc.
For cloud, take a look at Cognos Analytics & Planning Analytics!
Hi Danielle, I am glad that you posted this question. We are currently looking into changing our software provider. Based on my initial research, NetSuite seems like a good option for us (we are a fast growing marketing agency with a huge thirst for knowledge).
Has anyone implemented in their reporting model future oriented reports? What are you currently using? Any comments/thoughts about future oriented reporting?
I'm also at a fast growing high-tech company. We're experimenting with using Tableau and Tableau Online to pull together a lot of different data sources into a consolidated space and share it at a large level. There's a decent amount of setup work required, but it's very good at pulling together datasets that may not talk to each other well otherwise.
I would imagine that anything you would want to do for investors would be more of a curated experience. We've experimented with a few things, and right now we assemble things offline, and then share BOD slides and the like via googledocs.
One tool that you might look at is Grow.com. It's a SaaS tool that allows you to pull in metrics from lots of different sources, both financial and non-financial. It's pretty simple to use and they work pretty closely with you to set up the tool. One nice feature that I like about it is that it's super user-friendly and very easy to use, but also has the ability to write custom SQL queries to really get at exactly the right data.
Surprised that no one mentioned Domo yet. Definitely worth a look as that platform can pull data from many different sources (including from ERP,
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