Hopefully, you bought into the idea of having a one page dashboard to oversee your business.
It could be produced monthly, weekly or, perhaps, even daily in some circumstances.

So, what’s on your dashboard? What does that reveal about you?

One of my clients, which use a monthly dashboard that’s a very nice summary of his operations, keeps it to a minimal set of numbers. However, even in that minimal set of numbers, it’s interesting to see what happens to show up, in particular one number. One that is broken out is incentive payments. He’s keeping a close watch in that particular area. Another one I’ll mention is the income tax payment. He has a subchapter S corporation and to his credit he’s concerned about having enough money tucked away ahead of time in order to meet the quarterly tax payment requirements. I wish every company was on the ball in this area as much as he is.

So take a look at your dashboard, maybe step back and look at it from an objective level and ponder about what’s on there and what’s not on there. Here are some things to consider:

1. Look at the income statement portion of your dashboard. What kind of expense items show up? Is it a recap of all the major expenses? Are there certain smaller ones that wouldn’t make it on a dollar basis, but show up because it’s something that you want to keep your eye on? Is there an expense that’s a key driver of your business that’s not showing up?

2. Check out the balance sheet items. How are they summarized, what key items are you capturing? Are things which fluctuate showing up there? Do you have the key drivers of your balance sheet?

3. Owners equity. Does your dashboard have a roll forward on owners’ equity? After all, that may be key reason for the business is to keep growing the equity that you as the owner or as the shareholders have. Depending upon your corporate structure, you might have instead a section that really covers your compensation as owner. Have the income portion up above, but that’s for the company. Do you have a dashboard on there that shows what are you really getting to take out of the business? Can you see that you’re not just working for other people, for that something’s coming back to you too?

4. Cash flow. Have you captured the key components of cash flow, which includes operations, investing and financing?

5. Perhaps, some of the broadest categories of all, operational types of data. What kind of non-financial data is showing up? What would be the key metric that aren’t part of the traditional financial that you need to see? For example, I had a meat packing client. Some examples for them could be things like pounds produced, yield, quality metric, labor overtime, returns, average meat cost per pound.

Congratulations if you already have the dashboard. If you haven’t, now’s a great time to get started. If you do, then take a good look again at your dashboard. What’s on there and what does that tell you about what’s important to you? What’s not on there that should be?

Keep refining the dashboard and build it into an even more powerful tool.

Jon Paul, MBA, CPA, CMC, CM&AA

President, Value Added Finance Resources
Bringing new insights on results and maximizing company value