A good business dashboard can make a huge difference to your small businesses’ success. It’s one of the best ways to keep track of your entire business and everything it entails: from sales to social media marketing, and from business finance and accounting to keeping track of your team’s work.
In this blog post, I’m going to talk about why you need to use a business dashboard for your SME and help you find a great option for your needs.
What is a business dashboard?
Business dashboards differ from one another in some ways, but essentially, they are management tools that help businesses keep track of their entire activity, goals, and KPIs.
Using different tools and various integrations, your business dashboard can help you see the entire state of your business with one glance (well, a longer glance, but still very much faster than normal!), your KPIs (key performance indicators), your goals and objectives, and your campaigns.
Basically, it connects everything there is to know about your business, from your web analytics to your remaining cash and presents it in an easy to read format, all in one place.
This lead to 2 very clear benefits…
Be more organized and save time
Some business dashboards connect their own tools and apps, while others can integrate with other popular tools to keep them all in one place. Whatever the case may be, one thing is clear: you won’t have to use as many tools and apps as before – not even nearly.
You won’t need to jump from app to app, forgetting and resetting passwords left and right and, generally, using more tools and apps than you really have the time to.
Not to mention, the dashboard can track your KPIs for you; meaning, you won’t need to do that manually whenever the time has come. Rather, you can check the status of your KPIs each day in literally seconds.
Plus, business dashboards also help you track your financials; not only that, but you can also see at a glance when you need to send invoices, what invoices you still need to get paid, how much cash you have on hand so you can adjust your budgets, and much more.
Your entire business will be easier to manage when you and your team have all of this valuable information and data at your fingertips.
Make better business decisions
The ability to check the state of your business at any given moment without having to actually anything more than opening your dashboard will also help you make better decisions for your business.
As you are able to track your KPIs in real time, as well as have access to historical data and immediate access to your financial records, you can better understand exactly what is happening within your business and improve and optimize your strategies as needed.
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned over years of being a business owner is that data is one of your most important resources. It’s the best tool you have at your disposal to help you make better business decisions so you should always use data when running campaigns of any kind or making any business decision.
Instant access to your most important information
This is one of those things that any business owner, at least in my experience, will appreciate: instant, immediate access to all of your important and critical business information, all in one place.
Most notably, business dashboards help you keep track of your financial, banking, and sales numbers – but of course, it’s all up to you what information you need and the tools you use.
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Make your team’s lives easier and boost productivity
Business dashboards are often designed to help your entire business and team, not just the CEO or owner. Everyone can access the dashboards they’re interested in so that they can quickly see the information they need to make decisions and do their work.
This helps your whole team to be more productive with their time, instead of spending too long looking for the information they need, asking others for helps, and so on – plus, many business dashboards also use productivity tools.
So if you’re still with me, you’re probably wondering… well, where can I find one of these dashboards? Here are some of the best options:
9 Spokes
9 Spokes is a big favorite of mine because it’s free and it works with a lot of popular tools that you might already be using for your business.
That is because it integrates with numerous different types of business tools and software so that you can pull the relevant information you need from these tools into one easy-to-use dashboard.
And that actually brings me to another big plus: you can also use it as a way to find better, more relevant tools to use for your business. Just use their app integrations directory to find tools in all kinds of categories (9, to be specific, as per their name – the categories are listed above in the screenshot), see what they can do for you, and try them out to see if you need them.
Once you’ve added all of your tools and built your custom dashboard to focus on the stats and data that matter to you, you will be able to track, among others:
- Your web traffic
- Your social media marketing engagement and analytics
- Your financial status and accounting information (money owed/owing, gross profit, and so on)
- Email marketing campaigns
And a lot more where that came from. As I mentioned before, you can customize the dashboard to your liking and connect the apps that matter to you.
Cyfe
Another good option is all-in-one business dashboard Cyfe, which allows you to monitor pretty much anything you want about your business: multiple websites and your different departments.
Plus, you can create dashboards for all of your needs:
- startups for real-time business KPIs,
- social media for your marketing analytics,
- marketing dashboard for tracking other marketing campaigns (like SEO, email marketing, SEM),
- a clients’ dashboard for tracking their website traffic, SEO, and social media,
- web analytics dashboard for checking your traffic and the quality of your traffic (not all traffic is created equal!)
- financial dashboard for tracking your revenue, your business expenses, and others,
- sales dashboard where you can see your sales goals, win/loss sales reports, etc.,
- project management for tracking your tasks and campaigns
- and finally, IT for monitoring your website and app performance
Conclusion
A good business dashboard can be your best friend. A best friend with incredible memory that can tell you at any moment how your KPIs are faring, how much cash you have left for your business, how much traffic your website is getting, and what invoices you really need to send like, right now. And these are just some of the things that your dashboard can do. As I was saying – a very good friend.
This is a great investment for SMEs, as small businesses often struggle with time, focus, and financial resources. With a business dashboard, they can get more organized, more productive, and help them focus more on making better business decisions based on actual data.
Do you use a business dashboard for your SME? What do you use and why?
