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What is dashboard reporting?
Dashboard reporting is an illustrative, visual representation of your company’s key metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs.) Dashboard reports are one of the most valuable reporting tools that finance professionals can use to track, understand, and improve performance. Often dynamic and automated, dashboard reporting fills in charts, graphs, heat maps, and other illustrations with your organization’s data to give you an at-a-glance understanding of your organization’s performance. -
Why is a reporting dashboard beneficial?
Reporting dashboards are essential for any business or finance professional that wants to use data to drive decision-making. In our current, disruptive, ever-changing business climate, it’s critical for finance to keep a pulse on KPIs, ensure the business is on track to meet its goals, and not straying in the opposite direction. Dashboard reports give finance professionals this oversight.
So you don’t have to wait to review monthly or quarterly reports, the most useful dashboard reports are real-time. Software automates the dashboard report so that it’s populated with the most recent data, which gives finance professionals an up-to-date look the most recent performance.
For example, CCH Tagetik’s drag and drop dashboards for ad hoc analysis enable users to drill down into the dashboard’s data, extract insights, and share them with users across the organization. -
How does CPM software improve dashboard reports?
A dashboard report is only as insightful as the data you feed into it. When underpinned by financial and non-financial reporting data, centralized in a corporate performance management software, your dashboard report benefits from advanced analysis.
In a CPM context, the software you use for dashboard reporting typically collects disparate data from around your organization using a powerful processing engine, like the CCH Tagetik Analytic Information Hub.
CPM dashboard reports:- Bring widespread data together so you can see how financial and operational performance interact
- Make data from multiple reports viewable on a single dashboard
- Update as the numbers do, so you can identify fluctuations in performance as they occur
- Give you the ability to drill into reports and view the granular data that makes up aggregate results
- Give you the ability to customize reports and display the data most relevant to your role or task
- Are shareable and enable finance teams to provide stakeholders with instant insights when they need it most
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How to build a custom dashboard report
CPM platforms often have some best-practice dashboards built-in, but they also allow you to create and customize your own dashboard. Here are some best practices for creating a customized dashboard report:
Connect diverse data: Connect consolidated financial data, budgeting, forecasting, and planning data, and non-financial operational data to paint a picture of critical information for decision-makers and stakeholders.
Drill into performance: Sometimes aggregate numbers bear exploring, especially if a performance fluctuation is surprising or unexpected. Finance professionals should be able to define dimensions, like time period, region, entity, or even SKU, and then drill, slice, and dice that data to get to the root of the metric. Drill down allows you and other stakeholders to investigate and see results from different angles.
Aesthetic illustrations and data visualizations: The best way to understand data trends is to visualize them. Bar graphs, line graphs, heat maps, and charts breathe life into otherwise one-dimensional numbers. They paint a meaningful picture of otherwise isolated data that can help decision-makers make sense of information in a new way. Of course, when creating a custom dashboard report for consumption by a specific stakeholder, like a manager, CEO, or CFO, you want to ensure every metric matters to your audience and cut any extraneous fluff.
Connect stakeholders: Dashboards should be shareable and viewable to anyone who can benefit from their analysis. Whether the purpose of the dashboard report is an FYI for managers, a collaborative dashboard that unites joint efforts, or KPIs relevant to leaders from different departments, reporting dashboards should be shareable and collaborative.
Make dashboards predictive and showcase what-if scenarios: With a best-in-class CPM solution, you can compare real-time results with projections and even play-out what-if drivers to see how outcomes would change if the scenario changes. This is advantageous in times of disruption where you need to be agile and make snappy but thoughtful decisions. -
Dashboard reporting in CCH Tagetik
CCH Tagetik has advanced yet simple report dashboarding that enables you to access new performance dimensions with customizable drag-and-drop dashboards. Whether you want to visualize simulations and operational performance, keep track of real-time KPIs, or produce heat and geo-maps, our report dashboarding suite lets you create beautiful performance visualizations.
Enter the next evolution of CPM with CCH Tagetik powered by the Analytic Information Hub.