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Small Business Dashboards
Several readers of Dashboards By Example have reminded me that the objective of the blog, as the name suggests, is to show actual examples of dashboards. It’s nice to see the cutting edge visualizations and hear about the theories behind software usability, but they want to see more real business dashboards from the trenches. “Let’s have some real dashboards!” is the message.
Thanks for the feedback! Let’s get back to real world executive dashboards and the KPIs used by management to keep tabs on their businesses.
Today we have three examples of dashboards used by small business owners. Designed using InfoCaptor, a dashboarding tool from Nilesh Jethwa, these dashboards surface data from QuickBooks.
This first screenshot is used by the owner of a landscaping company. Click on the image to enlarge it and you’ll see metrics such as Cost of Goods Sold (COGS), Sales by Period, Sales by Product and Top Customers.
Continue reading by clicking on the “See More” link and you’ll find 2 other small business dashboards.
The next dashboard is used by a small business similar to the first, but with a focus on irrigation systems. Here is the screenshot. Again, click on the image to enlarge it. Note the controls on the top of the dashboard that allows the user to change the reporting period for the metrics.
Finally, this last dashboard example, also drawing financial information from Intuit QuickBooks, is used by a pharmacy to track financial analytics. The portlets on this dashboard include:
- Income Distribution
- COGS Distribution
- Expense Distribution
- Profit and Lost
- Current Ration
- Accounts Received / Accounts Payable
- Debt to Equity Ratio
Note the dial gauges on the right side of the dashboard. Hard coded onto each dial is an indication of a target value for the financial indicator.
Here’s a note that accompanied the submission of these small business dashboards:
Hi Dashboardspy,
I thought of sharing these dashboard screenshots. These dashboards are
custom built for small business owners who use Quickbooks.These dashboards were developed for the pharmacy, irrigation and agriculture
industry. I hope it is worth posting them on your website.Small business owners have lot to gain from dashboard functionality but due
to the high priced software it really doesn’t fit their bill. There is very
less focus or attention given to small businesses when it comes to BI and
reporting. These dashboards were designed using InfoCaptor and now is part
of our client’s daily stop.Thanks
Nilesh
Tags: Small business dashboards, quickbooks dashboard, executive dashboard, financial KPI Metrics
What do you think about this dashboard post? Please leave a comment. Your opinions are valuable to the entire business dashboarding community.
8 Responses to “Small Business Dashboards”
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Those dashboards are horrid.
Pie charts are bad enough, 3D pie charts are significantly worse, and they “improved” on them by making the wedges translucent and applying overlapping labels connected to their wedges using entangled leader lines. Use a horizontal bar chart, so the labels along the category axis can be easily read.
Dollar values are shown in several formats, ranging from zero decimal digits to three (i.e., in tenths of a penny!).
The column charts are so wide that they severely limit what could be displayed, and there is no reason that the date labels along the bottom should not be displayed horizontally for easy reading.
As ever, the dials show a single value in a huge space. You could show two or more timelines, showing trends leading up to the current value, in the space of each dial.
These complaints are aired again and again, yet such dashboards are spreading like weeds. I guess to the uninitiated they look very pretty, but they don’t convey much information at all.
A tough one.
Likely a small business won’t know or care about the finer points of dashboarding. They’ll rightly think they’ve got better things to do with their time.
What is needed is a very quick “give us your feeds and pick your visualisations” type of product priced to attract the small business, which means really that it needs to be a part of software they use for other reasons.
We’re some way away from that at present, but the big vendors are gradually adjusting their pricing models to attract this market segment. It’s only a matter of time.
Whether they will get good dashboards at that point is still anybody’s guess - even if a company only builds good visualisations, the next company won’t, and who will the customer go for? - The one who can do what they want or the one who can’t.
Again, nobody is going to take the time to educate these guys becuase frankly the typical small business won’t spend enough on this sort of thing to give any decent ROI on a bespoke service.
Maybe they could contract in some sort of BI professional to do some of this, but again I think they will see it as an unnecessary expense.
And yes, they can use excel, but that’s irrelevant - you can make horrid graphs with excel just as easily as with any other package.
Sorry - in retrospect this seems a little pessimistic.
Terrible examples of dashboard!
How to (don´t!!!!) make dashboards
I’m typing this again because I don’t know if my last attempt at a comment on this post worked or not.
I say that these dashboards are fine for what they are.
Mr. Tom has the key in that the audience is the small business owner that really doesn’t know (or care) about the fine points of data visualization. They just want a visual depiction of his or her KPIs and metrics.
Take a look at the dials. They have text on them indicating what “good” values should be. This tells you that the dashboard users are at a certain level of sophistication.
For those people, dashboards like these work fine - the best practices of information visualization take a back seat to the fact that they at least have a dashboard panel up.
Yes, Mr. Peltier is correct in that there are many mistakes, but I say that we should applaud the fact that dashboards are being used by the small business community.
The dashboards will evolve. The first step (and largest/hardest to take) is to come up with a first generation dashboard. Once up, these dashboards can be “made right” by learning about and applying information visualization best practices.
I say “hooray” for these dashboard users!
DataViz
Ditto - except whilst I’m sure they will evolve, I’m less sure they’ll improve.
The small business will generally just buy this off the shelf - they generally don’t have the resources (especially time) to do anything else, which means that they will be no more or less good than the “ideology” of the vendor that comes up with the best small business pricing structure!
Gotta agree - these dashboards do not look pleasing to the eye. However I would also agree that as long as they enable a small business owner to focus on their key metrics and make correct decisions they are useful.
Flynet are soon to launch a Dashboard Portal where the dashboard is built for you! Small and medium enterprises can very simply choose their preferred KPI’s, enter their data, choose how they wish to see each KPI and are then presented with a fully functional dashboard. key to this offering is the ability to focus on those variables/ KPI’s most vital to their business. Once live it would be great if some of the “dashboard gurus” on here could offer their opinion.
Great news - the new web based business dashboard portal (beta version) is now live at dashboard-portal.com. Plug in your numbers (kpi’s) and get an autogenerated dashboard. Please try it out and feedback.
If you’re looking for more screenshots of attractive, information-packed dashboards, we have posted more than a dozen at our site, inetsoft.com, search keyword ‘examples’