Steering tools: the best dashboards for your company

By Maëlys De Santis

Published: 5 November 2024

A good management tool helps to solve all the problems faced by any entrepreneur. What are the key performance indicators( KPIs ) you use to monitor the day-to-day progress of your business? What do you base your decisions on? How can you assess results over time? And above all, how do you know what to do to improve them?

Before comparing the different dashboards, we need to look at how they respond to the problems that may be affecting you.

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Project management at a glance

Without management tools, you've got your head in the sand

Steering your business by sight will get you nowhere. Are you a company director, just starting out? Or a manager running a small business? You know what it's like to be in a hurry, and what being "under water" means, and you're juggling deadlines. You've got one burning issue after another, leaving you neither time to breathe nor time to analyse. Just like young entrepreneurs, you deal with the most urgent matters without any strategy. And this emergency management, which is supposed to be a one-off, has been going on for a while.

Performance indicators: the rest is just appearance

The tricky thing about having your head in the sand is relying on a misleading feeling. You're swamped with work, there are more and more customers. From the outside, this looks positive. In fact, if there's demand, it's because you've found your market. The lights seem to be green, and the barometer is at a good level. But these are not performance indicators, only appearances, and they in no way prove that your company is on the right track.

Performance indicators, or KPIs, include, for example :

financial performance indicators: profitability, cash flow, payment times for customers and suppliers, etc.
organisational performance indicators: production capacity, subcontracting requirements, absenteeism rate, etc.
commercial performance indicators: sales, competitive analysis, etc.
corporate social responsibility indicators: energy and raw materials consumption, as well as employee well-being.

Performance measurement is the only thing that counts

From the inside, the analysis may be quite different. The number of customers may have increased, while their satisfaction rate is falling. What about the average time taken to process a request? It may have doubled, which would explain the collapse in the loyalty rate. In other words, relying on appearances is risky. To see things through, you need more tangible evidence. You need to measure your strengths using performance measurement tools such as an audit, for example, which can be carried out internally, to ensure that your company is healthy and heading in the right direction.

How can you gain better control over your management?

Taking a long-term view

To assess the overall trajectory, you first need to know where you're going. Before you even begin the recruitment process, you need to know where you're going. A sailor never sets sail without knowing his course. It's the same for your company. Set a course, so that you can judge your position afterwards. Otherwise, it's too tempting to be a weather vane. If you let yourself be carried along by the waves, you'll end up back where you started, going round in circles or drifting off into the distance.

Good governance requires strategic management

There is nothing definitive about setting a course. You shouldn't be afraid of change, and you shouldn't hesitate to reverse a decision if it's the wrong one. As you can see, agility is not just a management method, but the essential principle of a good manager. They need to be able to bounce back and adapt their marketing and financial approach to suit the context.

This calls for a range of skills, not just in management but also in economic issues. This is the definition of a good manager, and what makes them effective: they face up to their responsibilities, are not afraid of investment or human resource costs, seek innovation, do not hesitate to communicate their ideas, and pursue a single goal: continuous improvement. This is the famous iterative methodology, known as lean, which is particularly appreciated by start-ups: get to the essentials, invest, and do it with zero waste.

Keep a structured framework

You'll be all the quicker to make the right decisions if you understand the context. Your initial itinerary is bound to evolve. However, it will continue to serve as a frame of reference, providing a cross-cutting link to the stages of your journey. In other words, your initial concept, the idea that got you started, should not change too much. Your approach to the market should be open to change, but you need to maintain a structured framework, a strategy implemented from the outset. For example, if you have decided to sell a new application, adapt to the market, evolve, but never lose sight of your objective: your application and its functionality.

Developing your information system

Your information system is all the resources you need to manage your business and stay on course. It involves installing the right tools.

Building your first dashboards

Designing a management dashboard is first and foremost a personal issue. Developing it is as important as the management itself, and you can't do it blindly. The first management tool you need should be a balanced scorecard, but to draw it up, you need to identify your needs and define your objectives. This assessment takes the form of questions: what are your short-, medium- and long-term objectives? Where do you want to take your business? How do you want it to develop? Once these elements have been decided, they need to be translated into metrics, i.e. figures: number of customers, market coverage, retention rate, turnover generated.

Learning to master the tool

With these initial elements, you can get started. Build your table. Excel will do for a start. It allows you to establish an initial relationship with this type of tool. The trick is to formalise this first draft. Some of the templates provided by the tool will save you time. Be careful, however, not to lose sight of your specific characteristics by trying to fit them into an overly generic mould.

The limits of Excel

Excel quickly proves to be limited. Powerful in terms of calculations and possibilities, the tool nevertheless retains a significant amount of manual parameterisation. You have to enter your formulas and create links from one sheet to another. The data is static and cannot be updated easily.

Management tools for small organisations

To support the growth of small and medium-sized businesses, the dashboard functionality can be integrated into the overall scope of your ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) tool.

This is what Axonaut offers. Business management software that combines ERP and CRM, one of its strengths is its user-friendly interface for monitoring your activity.

Ideal for VSEs and small SMEs, it helps you manage your cash flow thanks to a direct connection to your bank account and intuitive dashboards to improve your organisational management (holidays, appointments, tasks, expense reports, etc.).

Business Intelligence for medium-sized to large organisations

A connected, customised sales dashboard

Various SaaS (Software as a Service) software publishers offer dashboards that can be synchronised with your other business tools. Using APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), your accounting data feeds directly into your dashboards. This software does not replace a good accountant, but it does help you manage your accounts. So you have all the latest information at your fingertips, so you can make quick decisions.

Modules for reporting

Some SaaS software products are stand-alone modules, such as MyReport, which produces reports based on your data. Microsoft also has its Power BI solution. Vizzboard's Quickstart programme is another good alternative. And if you have large datasets, Bime, with its ability to handle Big Data, is just the thing.

A performance management solution

EMAsphere is a good example of this, dedicated to SMEs and SMBs. Featuring intuitive, dynamic dashboards, it enables you to make the right decisions at the right time for optimal management of your business. This collaborative solution integrates perfectly with your existing software, such as EBP Compta, Sage 100, Exact, etc.

Business plan, budget, cash flow, forecasts, operational flows... EMAsphere can quickly become an indispensable tool for managing your business.