The 3 Types of Business Dashboards Your Company Needs

Many people we speak with are in the process of researching business intelligence (BI) software and are often curious about the types of business dashboards that would help drive their business forward. In this article, we’ll outline the three types of business dashboards that will be the most helpful to your business:

1. Operational Dashboards: Operational dashboards track the performance of operational activities, which are the day-to-day activities that keep your business running. For example, in a financial department the operational dashboard would keep track of accounts payable or accounts receivable activities. Within a sales department, the dashboard would track activities such as the number of demos conducted or the number of outstanding proposals.
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2. Strategic Dashboards: Strategic dashboards manage higher-level activities, showing key insights into the overall performance of a business and opportunities for a business. Normally, strategic dashboards would include information relevant to the executive team. This information would comprise things such as year-over-year sales or overall customer satisfaction over a longer period of time.
3. Analytics Dashboards: Analytical dashboards allow businesses to take a granular look at their data in order to unearth specific patterns and trends. For example, a company’s operational dashboard may show that 90 percent of the company’s customer invoices are being paid on time and 10 percent are being paid late. The analytics dashboard would allow the business to dig into the 10 percent of bills being paid late to identify the patterns or common factors influencing late payments.

The key to figuring out which dashboard you need is to determine the purpose of your dashboard (i.e. what problem does it solve?) and the audience of your dashboard. For example, operational dashboards will cater to those handling day-to-day operations, strategic dashboards will cater to your executive team, and analytical dashboards will cater to your data analysts.

The Bottom Line

Now that you know how to identify your dashboard needs at a high level, you’re ready to learn more about how to create effective dashboards and common business dashboard mistakes. Additionally, if you’re interested in learning more about Yurbi’s business dashboard solutions, request a demo and we’ll reach out to you!