KPI Dashboard KPI

A KPI dashboard is one screen of numbers that an owner looks at each morning with a coffee. The letters stand for key performance indicator, which only means a figure that tells you how the business is doing. So the dashboard is where five or six of those figures sit together, big enough to read from a step away, and choosing which five is harder than building the screen.

A useful figure is one that would change what you do today. That usually means yesterday's sales, the money customers still owe you, the orders waiting to go out, the ten products that ran out, and the average basket. If a number would not make you pick up the phone or move somebody onto another job, take it off the screen. Most dashboards fail for exactly that reason, because they show thirty figures and nobody reads any of them. Linkysoft therefore starts with five and adds a sixth only when somebody asks for it twice.

Comparing branches or staff is where a dashboard starts arguments, because a shop on a main road will always beat one on a side street. That makes raw takings unfair, so compare like with like instead. Sales per hour the door was open, per person on shift, or against the same week last year all work better. And write the way each figure is worked out right beside it, because the first fight is always about the sum rather than the result.

Yesterday's totals are almost always enough, even where live figures that move while you watch look far more impressive. Those moving numbers cost real money to build, because every open screen keeps asking the database the same question. A figure worked out once each night is cheaper, calmer and easier to trust, which is why Storek shows a shop owner yesterday against the same day last week.

Two practical points are worth settling early. Every dashboard needs a button that sends the same numbers to Excel, because the accountant will ask for them. And a figure that cannot leave the screen is one people slowly stop believing. Each number also needs an owner, a named person who can explain it when it looks wrong. That is why Linkysoft builds the dashboard at the end of a web application project, once the daily work is in place, since you cannot count what the system does not yet record.