You may have heard people talking about dashboards as a way to see all of their important business information in one place. Perhaps you dismissed these conversations as solutions which were available and useful for only larger organizations? While dashboards may have gotten their start and initial adoption through use by larger organizations, there are now many options available which small businesses can utilize…and at affordable prices!

What’s A Dashboard?
A dashboard is a type of report which is displayed through a web page and provides you with graphical representations of information you want to track and evaluate (including trends). Typically, a business will identify specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which are relevant to their business and operations. KPIs include metrics such as sales revenue, visitors to your website, time to resolve customer support requests, number of customers served, inventory items sold and in stock, and the list goes on. Obviously, the KPIs that are important to your business will depend significantly on the industry in which you operate.

How A Dashboard Can Help You
Perhaps you already track KPIs for your business in various systems, and maybe you go so far as to aggregate many of these through a tool such as Excel. The cool thing about dashboards is they provide you with dynamic (live updates) information based on the ongoing operations of your business. Better yet, many of the dashboard solutions available today are developed to integrate with popular cloud computing solutions and apps your business may currently use. This means you can easily gain information from your social media feeds, web hosting provider, CRM, accounting solution, and others, all in one place. In the past, aggregating all of this information would have required a significant investment of time to obtain, analyze and present it in a usable format. Now, thanks to solutions such as those discussed below, it is easier than ever to implement a dashboard solution for your business.

Dashboard Solutions Available
As this post is specific to dashboards being utilized for small businesses, I will not discuss solutions intended for larger organizations with significant business intelligence or data analytics needs. Rather, these solutions have proven to be effective and affordable for small businesses based on my research and experience.

All of the dashboards below provide for a relatively easy implementation with the use of drag and drop for placement and setup of the widgets. These solutions provide easy integration to many of the apps your organization may already use as well as providing the ability, albeit with a little more effort and technical knowledge, to integrate other databases. I have noted any significant differences in the dashboard solutions below.

Cyfe (www.cyfe.com) has been our favorite solution to work with to date. They provide a robust tool that is easy to. They offer an integration to QuickBooks which the others don’t. Definitely noteworthy is that they offer a ‘forever free’ version which the others in this post do not (the others do offer free trials).

Geckoboard (www.geckoboard.com) offers similar functionality to that of Cyfe. Frankly, I was unable to find anything which made Geckoboard stand out from the others during my research.

Leftronic (www.leftronic.com) provides a notable integration which I have not seen from the other solutions, Zapier. Zapier is a tool used to integrate many of the apps your business may already use. While I have not personally evaluated the extent to which Leftronic’s integration with Zapier expands the available apps Leftronic can pull data from, I suspect this could significantly increase the number. However, Leftronic does not advertise an integration to Xero or QuickBooks. They do advertise an integration with FreshBooks.

Ducksboard (www.ducksboard.com) does not advertise integrations with any of the common financial apps which I feel is a significant downside.

If you are interested in implementing a dashboard in your organization, I encourage you to take a look at these solutions and give each of them a try. If you don’t have the time to complete a full evaluation of the options available, just let us know and our team would be happy to help you out!

I recently had the opportunity to prepare a guest blog post for our friends over at G2 Crowd. The post covers the topic of selecting accounting software and can be seen here.

If you are interested in reading legitimate reviews of business software from actual users you should check them out at www.g2crowd.com. Not to mention, their dynamic rating Grids are really cool!

One of the foundational values of Atlasphere is Mentorship. Mentorship, as we refer to it on our website, includes fostering a strong mentoring culture internally for our employees as well as for our clients. I have been asked on numerous occasions what we specifically mean when we refer to being a mentor to our clients. So, I wanted to take a few minutes and explain our mentorship philosoph.

While clients have many choices when choosing a provider for their outsourced bookkeeping and accounting needs, many will provide a client with monthly financial reports and expect them to decipher what they mean. If you are like most business owners, you are in business to pursue your passion, not to become an accountant! This is why we focus on working with our clients to learn the operations of their business, and more importantly, help them identify the levers which can be adjusted and how these will affect the financial performance of the business. While the financial statements we provide to our clients are valuable, we put as much credence in making sure clients understand where the numbers are coming from and how these can best be utilized to make business decisions. To further assist with the decision-making process, we provide ad hoc reporting services wherein the business specific metrics are tracked and reported.

The mentorship mentality doesn’t only apply to the accounting and bookkeeping services though! All of our service offerings place an emphasis on helping the client to understand the information we provide them or the work we perform. Contact us to learn how we can help you!