FP&A dashboards show how your company is doing at a glance. They include the latest insights into what matters most to your company at this point in time. The job of the dashboard is to tell leaders when corrective action is necessary and which business driver to investigate. If it doesn’t, that’s a problem. Here is a brief overview of what may cause your dashboards to fail and what to do to fix them.

Do you know the difference between dashboards and scorecards? They have different objectives. The former serves as a quick snapshot of how the company is doing. Dashboards cover a broad range of metrics and are only discussed if there is a big issue.

Scorecards on the other hand need to do more. They need to measure the company’s strategies and give a clear yes or no answer if they are working.

Creating scorecards that achieve that isn’t easy - so I summarized it in this brief post.

You never want to report just raw data. All that does is saying “I don’t know what this means. How about you try to figure it out?” Instead, you need to show what’s the insight behind the data. Like most things, it’s a skill that can be learned.