Everything You Need to Know About Dashboards

Graphic representation always provides more information than textual, and you can detect patterns more easily. A carefully designed dashboard can be a vital tool for your organization. It can provide a quick and easy insight into your business data with simple graphics. A dashboard is essentially telling the story of your data visually.

Eases Communication

You might notice that a functional dashboard eases your communication within your organization as well as with your customers, vendors, etc. You should aim for a simple dashboard: something everyone can understand intuitively that won’t require much handholding or explaining. If you try to over-complicate things or design a highly powerful dashboard, it will become quite tedious to explain it to others, and it will lose its purpose.

Characteristics of a Dashboard

A functional dashboard must be easily modifiable since demands and functionality can change with time. When you are designing your dashboard, you must keep this primary characteristic in mind, and you be able to modify it easily. Additionally, if you have plenty of people in your organization who are familiar with the dashboard design, you don't need to worry about employee turnover and modifying it in the future.

Reports vs. Dashboard

Your dashboard provides a useful view of all your KPIs and integrated data from various sources. It is a unified view into all your data no matter where it comes from. There is also another critical difference between your BI reports and dashboards, which is the fact that dashboards have real-time information, whereas reports are based on a static view of the data. Moreover, a dashboard represents how your data has been performing historically and how one metric is performing with respect to another.

Types of Dashboards

A dashboard is essentially a handy tool for executives in your organization. You can classify dashboards into two distinct types: operational dashboards and analytical dashboards. Operational dashboards monitor business processes and track KPIs and metrics. On the other hand, an analytical dashboard analyzes loads of information and enables you to discover insights and predict outcomes.

What is Dashboard Software?

Dashboard software is becoming increasingly popular as it helps you design intuitive dashboards on a single screen. Your data is no longer scattered over pieces of paper; instead, it's all consolidated for viewing on a single easy-to-use portal. All dashboard software comes with predefined templates for you to use. You can customize these templates for your usage.

With the use of appropriate dashboard software, you can design the perfect portal for your enterprise and provide your users with a functional tool for analysis. You can improve your decision-making, strategize your business, and predict future performance.