I'm looking for some ideas on Dashboards for my Exec team. Obviously, sales and cash, but what else? How long do you go back for trend showing? Any sites recommended that might show examples?
Dashboards - What to include
Answers
I created a Dashboard with Sales, Open Orders, Potential Orders, Budget and then how close we were to meeting those goals (12 month).
Other KPI's included (vs Budget) Cash, Inventory, EBITDA and a snapshot of A/P, A/R, Open PO's, Breakdown of Spend (Selling, G&A, other divisions and then a group of sales comparisons
Rich
As a consulting firm, the following may be helpful:
1. Consultant utilization
2. Consultant realization
3. Project WIP, Billings, Deferred Revenue
4. Project forecasts-to highlight projects where estimate to completion may be worse than budgeted
5. Your firm has a number of markets and service offerings, so I would think that revenues + margins by customer, market and by service type would help show where and how you are making most of your money.
6. Project pipeline-what opportunities are you pursuing that have not yet turned into contracts
7. The trending periods may be both quarterly and longer term, e.g. if your projects are multi year projects you may want longer periods.
Some of these dashboards may be shown at different levels of detail, e.g. CEO view may differ from the view of your area managers, but the source data is all the same.
Hope this helps
Len
1
Thank you, these pretty much cover the thoughts I had, but there were a few new items to consider.
Rich
I include the following on our company dashboard:
1) Sales - Current fiscal year-to-date vs. Last fiscal year-to-date
2) # of Order - Current fiscal year-to-date vs. Last fiscal year-to-date
3) Operating Expenses - Current fiscal year-to-date vs. Last fiscal year-to-date
4) Profit - Current fiscal year-to-date vs. Last fiscal year-to-date
5) Net Cash Flow - Current vs. Prior year
6) Employees - Today vs. same day last year
7) Gross Margin rate - Last month, month-before last and YTD and Prior YTD
8) Days Sales Outstanding - Last month, month-before last and YTD and Prior YTD
9) Days Inventory On Hand - Last month, month-before last and YTD and Prior YTD
10) Receivables Turnover - Last month, month-before last and YTD and Prior YTD
11) Inventory Turnover - Last month, month-before last and YTD and Prior YTD
12) Working Capital - Last month, month-before last and YTD and Prior YTD
13) Asset Turnover - Last month, month-before last and YTD and Prior YTD
14) Return on Assets - Last month, month-before last and YTD and Prior YTD
15) Return on Equity - Last month, month-before last and YTD and Prior YTD
16) Debt to Equity - Last month, month-before last and YTD and Prior YTD
17) EBITDA - Last month, month-before last and YTD and Prior YTD
1
Jon,
Thanks lots of good stuff here. I must ask, do you manually prepare this data, or is it generated automatically by your
Rich,
Most importantly, if your client has financing in place that require monitoring of financial covenants/ratios, then at minimum your dashboard should include the lender's financial covenant/ratios requirements vs. actual results. Last thing you would want is the lender to call the Note due, because of non-compliance with the financial covenants.
1
Rosalio, Thank you. Fortunately not an issue for me, but you make a very good point.
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