It’s a pretty safe bet to say that most people who have used spreadsheets sat at least once to look at the financial growth of their company, and most likely through a solution provided by Microsoft. Tracking your financial KPI and making them right in this case require some (if not a lot of) knowledge about formulas and the hassle of putting the new data in the spreadsheet every time.
Moreover, if you have many people working on the same spreadsheet, you run into the common issue of “who has the latest version?”
And I’m not talking about just your financials, getting data from different services you might be using (online analytics, CRM and database imports etc.) and merging them together to get your KPIs require a lot of boring hours of work crunching numbers that we all wish we could spend on analysis and decision making.
Fortunately, as Internet based technologies continue to evolve, we now have access to a lot of different tools which will help us completely change the way we work with spreadsheets, KPI creation, reporting and dashboards.
For a start, it is now much simpler!
Thanks to cloud technologies and cloud based applications, you can now bypass the whole “number processing” step, your “spreadsheets” are automatically fed with the data coming from the different sources or services you are using.
You can directly select the indicators you want to use in your reports or dashboards avoiding a boring formula & customization process, and because of this permanent link to their sources, your indicators can be updated in real time!
No need to share a file anymore, you can directly share an internet link to a report with your colleagues and clients and they will get access to its latest version, wherever they are, whatever device they are using. (Tablets, mobile phones etc. )
And what if I tell you that you could already do most of this and it’s not as expensive as you think?
The future of business dashboards is online, is intelligent and is already here!