For a business that doesn't sell time-valued goods (goods with a explicit shelf life, like food) how often do you run KPI's? Assumption is all of us do this monthly, and look at cash vis a vis the A/R & A/P aging schedules as the payment cycle moves. But do you do it more often and how often. Here are some generalized KPI's (add more if you'd like): KPI Frequency Sales pipeline Buying pipeline Cash Position/Forecast Inventory Levels
KPI's, how often should you examine them?
Answers
Our company handles KPIs with the following frequencies:
Sales pipeline: Daily
Cash flow forecast: Weekly
A/R: Several times per week
Employee Perk-to-Payroll Ratio: Monthly
Sales cycle stats: Monthly
Our cash flow forecast, executive dashboard, and buying pipeline are all integrated, so any time we look at one we look at them all.
Hi Wayne,
Sales: weekly (former company even daily sales...I wonder what value added was that)-even weekly spill-overs are frequent...but somehow monthly seems not enough.
AR: weekly
Inventory: weekly
Accruals (important in some businesses)-monthly or quarterly
Other working Capital items monthly or quarterly
Gross Profit monthly
OPEX monthly
Operating profit: monthly
Cash flow-depends on each entity/company stability or complexity
In every multinational I've been working for, I've seen more or less the same. However changes from one company to another were decided based on changes in relative importance of the KPI inside the big picture. Also depends on the specific situation: high fluctuations of that KPI means more often monitoring.
I guess after all...there are best practices but flexibility is key.
hope this helps.
Mircea
We are a service provider and our KPIs are reviewed as follows:
Daily,month to date and year to date service orders including averages per day - reviewd daily on our dashboard. Same for quote requests.
Daily revenue/gross profit with month to date and Ytd including averages per day on our dashboard.
Sales/Gross Profit Piplines - daily
Cash flow - daily.
Cash forecast, Working capital,A/R & A/P - weekly.
P&L variance analysis - monthly.
Some of you use Dashboards.
Are they part of the
1
Both.
I will also point out that KPIs (or the frequency of analysis) are highly dependent on timely transaction recording processes.
As organizations move to capture transactions in real time (or close to it), the more these KPI dashboards will have value. Example, (and I may be exaggerating the point) there is no sense in running or looking at AR KPIs if your deposits are not done daily, or you invoice only at month end.
One can only analyze what is available info/data.
I would also add that a KPI monitoring system is as good as the action plan that follows a review session. The sooner a plan of action can be put in place, the better probabilities to impact positively in the desired target of the KPI.
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