Make Reporting Easier with Visual Dashboards

For most small businesses, the manual reporting cycle is tedious, involving numerous different websites and applications, exporting data, and then trying to consolidate it all into one single spreadsheet to determine how well (or how poorly) your business performed last quarter. It’s necessary to look at historical data like this to better run your business, but it’s not necessary to waste so much time doing it. By the time you’re done running reports and putting all the data together, you have no time or energy left to actually analyze it, and that’s a problem.

If you’re tired of manual reporting, you can try automated data dashboards to stop chasing down data and start using it to run a more effective business. Here are three steps to do so.

Identify the Most Important Metrics That Drive Growth

Have you ever experienced the feeling that you’re tracking everything? This is called “data bloat,” and it’s as uncomfortable as it sounds.

Regardless of how much you want to track it all, the unfortunate truth is that some data is more valuable than other data. If you try to analyze too much, you’ll just get distracted and confused from what really matters. Narrow your focus down to 3-5 metrics that tell you how well your business is operating; depending on the type of business you run, this could range from new leads and conversion rates to products sold or clients serviced.

Get rid of the “nice-to-know” data and focus on the information that’s vital to your business. This will aid in your automation efforts.

Connect Your Data Silos in a Central Visualization Hub

The most tedious part of your manual reporting is all the importing and exporting you have to do, but there’s a smarter way to do this work.

Modern business tools offer ways to connect accounting, marketing, and sales platforms directly to visualization tools. This eliminates you as the middleman and lets the tools communicate in the background, doing all the work for you. You can then utilize a real-time dashboard to raise awareness of metrics, minimize the risk of user error from manual data entry, and enable one-click sharing, ensuring your team always has accurate and up-to-date numbers.

Imagine if you could review your organization’s health simply by looking at a dashboard. Now that’s a game-changer.

Shift Focus From What Happened to What You Do Now

Reporting serves two key functions: to show you how your business is currently doing AND to offer data points to help you push your business further.

Most small businesses are stuck looking at data and wondering what went wrong or what went well. This is a defensive way of running a business, and while it’s nice to be able to explain everything on paper, it’s not necessarily productive without action. If you’re not identifying trends, focusing on high-ROI activities, or empowering your team with these metrics, then you’re wasting the potential these dashboards offer for your business.

The dashboard is key here, as it means that everyone else has already seen the numbers. They know what happened, and now they’re ready to talk strategy.

Automated dashboards aren’t supposed to give you more data; they’re designed to offer clarity. Stop wasting time playing data-entry clerk and start being the CEO your business needs. You can do this by working with Direct Technology Group to get your data visualization methods in place. Learn more today by calling us at (954) 739-4700.