An owner's dashboard: the five numbers that belong on one screen

People commission a dashboard in order to see the business. They open it for the first fortnight and then stop. The reason is almost always the same: twenty charts on screen and no clue what to do about any of them. There is data but no decision.

A dashboard that gets used is built differently: the main screen holds a handful of figures, each of which either confirms that things are fine or calls for action.

What a working dashboard is: a number without a comparison is useless

Revenue for the month means nothing on its own. It starts to mean something next to last month, the same month last year, or the plan. Every figure on a dashboard needs a basis for comparison — otherwise the viewer has to remember each time whether that is a lot or a little.

A usefulness test: look at the screen and try to name an action that follows from it. If you cannot within a minute, the screen displays data rather than helping you run anything.

Five figures that nearly everyone needs

The exact set depends on the business, but in most companies the main screen comes down to this.

• Money for the period against the previous one and against plan. Not one number but two or three, for context.
• Flow of enquiries: how many arrived, how many are in progress, how many were lost. The losses are the most useful part, and the part usually left out.
• Response time: how long from an enquiry to the first reply. The metric that moves fastest and feeds straight into revenue.
• Workload: orders in progress, deadlines, what is overdue. Here the dashboard replaces walking round the departments asking how things are going.
• One metric for your own bottleneck. For some that is stock on hand, for others average order value, for others the share of repeat customers. It differs for everyone, and it is usually the reason the dashboard was built at all.

What every figure needs

• The period and what it is compared with, on the screen itself rather than in settings.
• One click into the detail: you see a drop and immediately see what caused it.
• When the data was last refreshed. Without it there is no telling whether you are looking at today or the day before yesterday.
• A completeness line: how many records went into the calculation. A report that cannot tell you what is missing looks credible no matter how much data it loses.

Why dashboards get abandoned

Four reasons, each of which kills interest within a month.

• Too much of everything. Twenty charts is not rich analytics, it is a missing priority.
• The numbers do not match people's sense of reality and nobody can explain why. Trust is lost once and for good.
• The data is stale and the screen does not show it.
• No action follows. If nothing follows from a metric, nobody will look at it however pretty it is.

What to do with the rest of the data

The rest is not thrown away but moved to a second level: separate screens by area, visited when something on the main one looks off. Plus a regular summary into a messenger — for most owners that turns out more useful than the dashboard itself, because it arrives on its own and does not require logging in and remembering a password.

A good benchmark: the main screen fits without scrolling and reads in a minute. Everything that did not fit is important, just not important enough to look at daily.