Using a Centralized Dashboard to Manage Business

A centralized dashboard can help you simplify your business and effectively monitor key performance indicators (KPIs). Read further to learn how.

The Importance Of A Centralized Dashboard To Manage Your Business

Your customers keep growing quarter on quarter, yet your bottom line remains the same. Are you curious about what’s happening within your business? Do you wish to learn what’s working and what’s not? Then you need centralized Business Intelligence (BI) to simplify your business and gain actionable insights from your current business processes. 

You can analyze current and historical business data to predict future trends with the help of a dashboard. A centralized or multi-platform dashboard can serve as a highly effective and overarching tool to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs). Read this article to learn how you can get a bird’s-eye view of your business, whether managing an online business or effectively handling a brick-and-mortar store. 

What is a Centralized Dashboard? 

It is a BI tool that can help observe and extract KPIs to improve the business processes and enhance enterprise operations. Such a mission-critical tool goes beyond driving digital marketing efforts. It helps optimize supply chains and formulate strategies for business. It can also help generate employee hiring and retention plans.

An efficient and well-designed dashboard will include metrics that help you answer critical questions about your business. When you choose the KPI to incorporate into your dashboard, you need to ensure their life cycle is monitored for business impact. The thumb rule here is to select KPIs that align with your business goals, enabling you to measure when you’re meeting your goals. You will also get to know pretty quickly what is and isn’t working and what to tweak for greater performance.

What is the importance of a centralized dashboard in managing businesses?

The advantages are broad and varied. Here are a few of them.

1. Single source of truth – Consolidated Data Management

A centralized dashboard offers a detailed overview of your business data in real-time. This data can be the number of products sold, customer details, logistics, and payments mapped as a continuous customer journey. Other data classes can include digital marketing details, such as actions across multiple ad platforms, the impact of advertising expenditure, and more. 

In both data classes, the business owner will be able to discern advertising spending, the proportional business impact, and the return on investment (ROI) accordingly. Customization is the difference between viewing the data on this dashboard and the advertiser’s site or the business tool site. A high degree of customization allows for unique and useful data presentation. This particular advantage is a composite of all the other benefits that will result from the consolidation of business data.

2. Time-Saving in a Business Environment

A centralized dashboard helps manage online businesses and is also highly effective for simplifying business processes for brick and mortar stores.  

An expert will do all the work in setting up a dashboard in the background while you continue to work on your business full-time. Once the dashboard is customized according to your requirement, you will be able to toggle between multiple dashboards, saving considerable time. Without the dashboard, you would have to manually fetch business data from various applications online, one at a time. Post-installation, all the reports you require will be ready for download at the click of a mouse or tap of a screen. KPI reports can be customized for access across various formats, ranging from pdfs and Excel sheets to graphs and bar charts.

3. High Accessibility – Cloud Integrations

In the past couple of years, remote work has become the norm, and accessibility has been assigned top priority across industries and domains. 

With the help of a sophisticated centralized dashboard, you can facilitate a virtual work environment easily and help with team collaborations. Using the Cloud for data storage and access is what makes this possible, helping keep all team members of the business on the same page. Colleagues will be able to access business data across various devices and at any time and stay updated on the state of things in the enterprise.

4. Data Visualization 

The beauty of this dashboard lies in its simplicity. When it is set up correctly, any employee in your organization will be able to login and view business data and understand the same in a short time, if not instantly. A consolidated dashboard is designed to make KPIs easily understandable without training in business metrics.  

The display will highlight critical data points that will give the information at hand without requiring manual analysis of complex business data. KPIs can be presented in the form of anything ranging from simple Excel spreadsheets to highly visual elements such as pie charts, bar graphs, column charts, etc.

5. Decision-Making

Better business decision-making is the end goal of this comprehensive tool. It facilitates effective business decisions by the critical stakeholders of the business. Let us consider the example of a jewelry company that did not perform well in a quarter even though good sales were expected to boost the bottom line. After taking a look at the spends on the dashboard, leading up to and during the particular quarter of the year, one can formulate some insights. The quarter in question was the wedding season, for which ad expenses were directed towards generic non-seasonal ads. Therefore, there was consistent ad spending, but the ads were targeted at the wrong demographic. And therefore, the brand awareness for the particular period was low, leading to a dip in sales.

Conclusion

When used correctly, a centralized dashboard can effectively help manage online businesses and boost offline sales. Once your centralized dashboard is set up, you can clearly monitor and adapt your business towards higher operational efficiency and a bigger bottom line. The ROI on the implementation of a dashboard is significant and worth every business exploring the opportunity of growing their business beyond what is possible with conventional means of reporting.

DotPe offers you a a seamless store management system via the Merchant Dashboard. Entrepreneurs can easily control their business with the Merchant Dashboard with powerful analytics and advanced functionalities like adding access to staff members, setting store timings, reviewing the business performance and much more! With efficient order management, reporting and analytics, stay on top of your business numbers – always!

Help your business make a smooth transition online. Check out DotPe for more.