Steering tools: the best dashboards for your company

By Maëlys De Santis

Published: November 5, 2024

A good management tool helps to solve all the problems faced by any entrepreneur. What KPIs ( key performance indicators) do you use to monitor the day-to-day evolution 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 various dashboards, it's a good idea to clarify how they address the issues that may concern 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 newly-launched entrepreneur? Or a manager running a small business? You know what it's like to be in a hurry, and what being "underwater" means, and you're juggling deadlines. You're juggling deadlines. You've got one burning issue after another, leaving you neither time to breathe nor time to analyze. Like young entrepreneurs, you deal with the most urgent matters without any strategy. And this emergency management, supposed to be a one-off, has been going on for some time now.

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, customers are increasing in number. From the outside, this looks positive. In fact, if there's demand, it's because you've found your market. The lights are green and the barometer is high. 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, customer and supplier payment times, etc.
organizational 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 all 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 it takes to process a request? It may have doubled, which would explain the collapse in the loyalty percentage. So much for relying on appearances. To see the future, you need more tangible evidence. You need to measure your strengths using performance measurement tools such as an audit, which can be carried out in-house, to ensure that your company is healthy and heading in the right direction.

How can you better control your management?

A long-term vision

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 you have something to judge your position by. 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's 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. He must be able to bounce back and adapt his marketing and financial approach according to the context.

This calls for a range of skills, not only in management, but also in economic issues. This is the definition of a good manager, what makes him effective: he faces up to his responsibilities, fears neither investment nor human resource costs, seeks innovation, does not hesitate to communicate his ideas, and pursues a single goal: continuous improvement. This is the famous iterative methodology, known as lean, particularly appreciated by startups: get to the essentials, invest, and do it with zero waste.

Maintain a structured framework

The more you understand the context, the more likely you are to make the right decisions. 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 inspired you to start your own business, should not change too much. Your approach to the market should be open to change, but you need to maintain a structuring framework, a strategy implemented from the outset. For example, if you've decided to sell a new application, adapt to the market, evolve, but never lose sight of your objective: your application and its functionalities.

Building your information system

Your information system is all the resources you need to manage your business and stay on course. It requires the installation of appropriate tools.

Build your first dashboards

Designing a management dashboard is first and foremost a personal issue. Its development is as important as management itself, and cannot be done blindly. The first management tool you need should be a balanced scorecard, but to establish it, you need to identify your needs and define your objectives. This assessment takes the form of a series 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 evolve? Once these elements have been determined, they need to be translated into metrics, i.e. into figures: number of customers, market coverage, retention rate, sales generated.

Learn to master the tool

With these initial elements in hand, you're ready to get started. Build your table. For a start, Excel will do the trick. It allows you to establish an initial relationship with this kind of tool. The trick is to formalize this first draft. Some of the templates offered by the tool will save you time. Be careful, however, not to lose sight of your own specificities by trying to fit them into an overly generic mold.

Excel's limitations

Excel quickly proves its limitations. Powerful in terms of calculations and possibilities, the tool nevertheless retains a significant amount of manual parameterization. You'll have to enter your formulas and create links from one sheet to another. Static data cannot be easily updated.

Management tools for small businesses

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

This is what Axonaut offers. A business management software that combines ERP and CRM, one of its strengths is its ergonomic interface for tracking 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 organizational management (vacations, appointments, tasks, expense reports, etc.).

Business Intelligence for medium-sized and large companies

A connected, customized sales dashboard

Various SaaS (Software as a Service) software publishers offer dashboards that can be synchronized with your other business tools. Using APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), your accounting data feeds directly into your dashboards. This software is no substitute for a good accountant, but it does help you manage your accounting. This means you'll always have all the latest information you need to 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 program is a good alternative. And if your datasets are large, Bime, with its ability to handle Big Data, is just the thing.

A performance management solution

EMAsphere is a good example, dedicated to small and medium-sized businesses. 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 company.