What Is a KPI Dashboard?

Have you come across the term ‘KPI dashboard’ recently and wondered what it means? You likely know that KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are the metrics that matter most to your business, the data that executives, managers, and key decision-makers use to determine if your company’s performance is headed in the right direction.

Put simply, a KPI dashboard is a digital tool that helps streamline the collection, reporting, and visualization of your business’s data – from defined KPIs to emerging metrics that drive long-term strategic and daily tactical decision making.

Your business holds a wealth of data in all of its systems, from your CRM and website to financial and project management systems. All of this data tells the story of your business – but it can take a lot of time, effort, and work to pull all that data together to see the full story. That’s where a KPI dashboard (ideally an automated digital dashboard) can come into play to make the reporting process a whole lot easier.

Most data systems today have a reporting feature in place to show you the performance of the data within that specific system. The beauty of a fully integrated reporting dashboard is that it takes the information from all of the individual systems and combines them to show how each piece of data influences and impacts the data within the other systems – all in one view.

A truly integrated digital dashboard should be able to connect to every single data source throughout your business, no matter how that data has to be connected. That includes:

Without a KPI dashboard, you have to either 1) switch from system to system to view each individual data collection, or 2) export the data from each system and combine it by hand. Even if it only takes you an hour each week to mine and combine that data (and that’s being optimistic), that’s half a day every month or more than a week’s worth of work every year that you could be using to take action on the findings of your reports.