Finance Dashboards

Financial Data = Valuable Insights

Finance is business, business is finance; there’s no separating the two. Success is defined by making money, failure is defined by losing it. Your financial data can tell you where your business is at and where it’s heading – all you need is a Smetric Insights finance dashboard.

The Value of a Finance Dashboard for SMEs

Business intelligence and data analytics used to be out of reach for SMEs. But with these technologies becoming more affordable and accessible, that’s no longer the case.

Pop the bonnet of any business, from SME to multinational, and you’ll find that it’s driven forward by endless gears and cogs: people, processes, technologies, structures, assets and more. It’s no surprise that SMEs have trouble trying to keep track of everything. It’s even less surprising that organisational information often isn’t used to its potential.

A business intelligence dashboard seeks to not only make sense of this complexity, but draw insights and answers from it. In a modern finance dashboard, technology does all the busywork, extracting, managing and simplifying huge datasets, and presenting the results in a visual, intuitive way.

By gaining access to visualisations that reveal and demonstrate trends, ratios, fluctuations and risks, an SME can make responsive adjustments that guard against issues and increase profitability. Just as drivers use their car dashboards to ensure that they get from A to B, you can use insights drawn from your finance dashboard to get to where you want to go.

All your business’s financial data, condensed into a single, simple, intuitive and customisable interface. This technology is no longer restricted to multinationals – you can capitalise on it today.

Tracking Metrics via a Finance Dashboard

A Smetric Insights finance dashboard is capable of tracking all relevant finance KPIs and presenting the information in an intuitive, visual way. In the process it allows you to:

• Manage cash more effectively.
• Accurately track sales, profits and expenses.
• Accomplish financial objectives by making necessary adjustments on the fly.

As finance underpins almost all business decisions, finance professionals and departments are under increasing pressure to deliver clear and reliable reporting, and fast and meaningful insights. Smetric finance and accounting dashboards automate the overwhelming majority of this work, allowing a business to understand and accurately monitor financial data in real time. The data that you choose to track is up to you, but key financial metrics that a Smetric finance dashboard can make available include:

• Sales
• Margins          
• Productivity
• Job profitability
• Working capital
• Net assets
• External funding
• Banking covenants
• Budget actual and forecast variances
• Profit margin percentages
• And many more…

Data Exploration with Interactive Dashboards

Imagine getting to work, logging in, and being served a single, interactive view of every critical financial metric, which you can take in at a glance through charts, graphs and graphics. Smetric Insights finance/accounting dashboards offer exactly that.

Our finance dashboards come in a number of different forms and can be customised to suit your unique needs. Some of the more common types of finance and accounting dashboards include:

• Financial KPIs dashboard: What do you consider to be your most critical financial KPIs? Whatever they might be – Gross and Operating Profit Performance, Stock Turn and Debtors Days, Growth in Sales and Profit, Comparisons to Budget Last Year and Forecast, to name a few – tracking them can lead to more proactive management and greater financial stability.
• Cash management dashboard: Offering an overview of your cash flow situation and liquidity, this dashboard can offer insight into the effectiveness of your accounts payable and accounts receivable processes, and your general cash management health at any given moment.
• Profit loss dashboards: Gain a more intuitive understanding of your income statement by pairing it with interactive charts and graphs. Here you’ll find some of the most important financial performance metrics that describe exactly how healthy and profitable your business truly is.

A Smetric Insights dashboard allows you to treat your financial data as the living, breathing, changeable thing it is, to interact with it in real time, and to ultimately get true value from it.

5 Finance Dashboard Best Practices

How do you get all that you can from a Smetric Insights finance dashboard? The following best practices are a great starting point.

1. Choose metrics that matter: The information presented in your dashboard must be relevant. Avoid vanity metrics, instead choosing those that cut to the core of your business’s financial health.
2. Visuals over numbers: The human brain isn’t built to handle endless digits. Create a clean dashboard that serves information up in graphic form, rather than in tables and lists.
3. Add interest: While the functionality of your dashboard is priority number one, you should also try to retain a user’s interest through beauty. Use colour and graphics to present information in an eye-catching way.
4. Simplicity and accessibility: Your dashboard should be functional and beautiful, but it should also stay simple. Any team member should be able to understand the data that is relevant to them.
5. Avoid questionable data: While bad data should be removed through good data management practices, if you are still concerned certain data is inaccurate or incomplete, remove it entirely.

The Smetric Advantage

Dashboard finance reporting is an opportunity to make the most of the information at your disposal – data that likely holds many of the answers to the finance questions you’re currently asking. Our expert team can help you draw out those answers and present them in an easy-to-understand way. At Smetric we:

• Are knowledgeable and passionate about both technology and business.
• Understand that your business is unique, so take the time to get to know it.
• Make powerful technologies affordable and accessible.
• Generate insights from your current data.
• Produce a return on investment in weeks.

If you’re unsure whether your business would benefit from Smetric’s finance dashboard technology, we’d be happy to prove our worth. Simply send us a small sample of your financial data, and we can let you know how we can help – you don’t have to pay a cent!