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Building your Starter Business Dashboard, in Excel?

Written by: Merra Lee Moffitt

Article Overview: Running your business without a dashboard is like driving your car without one. You can't manage what you don't measure. Your business dashboard keeps you running fabulous, fast, and forever.

Building your Starter Business Dashboard, in Excel?

Running your business without a dashboard is like driving your car without one. You can run for awhile, but eventually you will run out of gas or oil, overheat, or your battery will die. Your business dashboard keeps you running fabulous, fast, and forever. Let's start with a very basic business dashboard in Excel. Like your car dashboard, your business dashboard should have a few, very useful numbers. Our basic business dashboard will start with monthly numbers. Each month collect these simple, easy to gather, items of information: Number of new prospects

Number of new clients

Number of units sold

Dollars in billings/sales/invoices

Dollars in collections

Expenses

Profit dollars

All these items are simple numbers that can be entered into your simple Excel business dashboard in a few minutes. If you don't currently collect them, just start. That's the great thing about a simple system like Excel, you can use other worksheets or cells to tally the numbers you need. The number of units mentioned above can be hours billed if you have a service business or the total number of products.

So how will you use your business dashboard?

When you compare this month's numbers to last month, is it an improvement? Mostly you'll find that the results are uneven. Some months things will go up, others down. One way to smooth your results and get a better feel for whether your business is improving is to keep a running average of the last six months. This way, you can see if you are better than average or worse than average.

Now, let's think about the ratios. If the number of prospects is going down, but new clients are going up, maybe you are closing a higher percentage of your sales efforts. If your number of new clients is going down, but dollars of sales is going up, maybe you are successfully selling higher priced products or services.

If they are going down in tandem, however, you are headed for a breakdown a couple months in the future. But, the good news is your simple Excel business dashboard told you in black and white with some warning. It's time to change something quickly. Maybe you quickly lower expenses so your profit dollars diminish less. Maybe you add some higher priced products so your sales dollars improve.

When we're in a recession, like today, it's probably fewer prospects and even fewer sales. At least your business dashboard will be able to tell you whether that new marketing campaign is bringing new prospects.

This business dashboard example is just a simple starter dashboard for your business. You can add more items, especially if there is an area you want to focus on.

You can't manage what you don't measure. So bottom line, if you don't have a business dashboard, you don't have a business.

Tell me, what have you added to your business dashboard and how did it help?

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Article Tags: car dashboard, cells, collections, excel business, few minutes, prospects, ratios, sales efforts, sales invoices, service business, six months, tandem



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