KPI Dashboard KPI

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

The trick is choosing them. A useful figure is one that would change what you do today. Yesterday's sales, the money customers still owe you, how many orders are 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 a person, take it off the screen. Most dashboards fail because they show thirty numbers and nobody looks at any of them. Linkysoft usually starts with five figures and adds a sixth only when somebody asks for it twice.

Comparing branches or staff is where dashboards start arguments. A branch on a main road will always beat a branch on a side street, so raw takings are unfair. Compare like with like. Sales per hour open, per person on shift, or against the same week last year. Write the way the figure is worked out next to it, because the first fight is always about the sum, not the result.

Yesterday's totals are almost always enough. Live figures that move while you watch feel impressive and cost real money to build, because every screen keeps asking the database for the same answer. A number refreshed each night is cheaper, calmer and easier to trust. Storek shows shop owners yesterday against the same day last week for exactly that reason.

Two practical points. Every dashboard needs a button that sends the same numbers to Excel, because the accountant will ask, and a figure that cannot leave the screen is a figure people stop believing. And each number needs an owner, a named person who explains it when it looks wrong. Linkysoft builds the dashboard last on a web application project, after the daily work is in place, because you cannot count what the system does not yet record.