KPI dashboards: what are they and how do you build one?

Published on September 6, 2021

If you’re a chef, you’ll take a look at your secret recipe book to see what ingredients you need for a delicious meal.

And in business, you’ll find your own ingredients for success in a neat KPI dashboard. Here you can track all the relevant metrics and evaluate your business strategy and performance.

So, what exactly is a KPI dashboard? And how do you build one?

In this article, we’ll share a few ways you can build a KPI dashboard for your team and maximize its potential when it comes to data analysis. Enjoy the read!

What are KPIs?

KPIs are the most important metrics that quantify the progress you’re making towards your business goals. Not all the metrics you’ll be tracking are KPIs - only the most relevant ones.

Businesses typically identify high-level and low-level KPIs.

High-level KPIs are determined on the company level, and they are used to measure overall business performance. Low-level KPIs track how each team’s projects and tasks affect the company’s progress towards the set goals.

What is a KPI dashboard?

KPI dashboards give a streamlined view of your selected KPIs, to help track and analyze the collected data. Creating a KPI dashboard lets you track the data in (near) real-time, quickly, and accurately. This in turn helps you make assess your performance and make smarter business decisions.

Also, the fact that you can view all the vital information in one place lets you understand the overall company health much better.

How to build a KPI dashboard

There are several ways to build a KPI dashboard, including spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. But you should opt for data visualization tools to maximize the potential of KPI analysis.

Spreadsheets and presentations let you create charts and graphs, but you need to enter information manually every time there’s a change in data. They also lack the collaborative features that let you share a dashboard with other team members, and work more efficiently.

A few good examples include Looker, Tableau, Klipfolio, and Chartmogul. These data visualization tools also typically integrate with various software solutions and analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Salesforce, HubSpot, SEMrush, email marketing software like MailChimp, and more.

That way, each of your teams can track crucial KPIs in the tools they know best, while you have centralized reporting for the whole business.

Tips for an effective KPI dashboard

Here are a few tips to help you build an effective KPI dashboard.

Only choose the most important KPIs to include in your dashboard. The whole point of these is to help you get an at-a-glance visualization of your data, not to confuse you even more with too much information.
Explore KPI templates before you start building a dashboard. There are plenty of free customizable templates available online, and you may save time by downloading one of those rather than creating a new dashboard.
Make sure your KPIs are well-defined and strategically important for your high-level company goals. That way, tracking them will make sense, and you’ll get data that will enable you to create an actionable plan and improve your performance.
Test different dashboard building tools. After you’ve tried several solutions for data visualization, you’ll find what works best for your business and helps you create more accurate and streamlined reports.

There's no real secret to good KPI reporting. You need to choose the right metrics, then find the tools to help measure and display them easily.

Quick and easy KPI tracking

It’s easy to be productive when you have a nice and clean desk.

In the same sense, monitoring KPIs and analyzing data becomes much simpler and more effective when working with a clear, organized dashboard where you can easily locate and understand the relevant information.

That allows you to react promptly and start working on an improvement plan as soon as you identify an issue in your business performance. Or even better, never miss a data trend that you can use to your advantage again.

Finance tools & tech Finance Insights

Spendesk Team

Spendesk has one goal: to remove the hassle of spending at work.

Get started with Spendesk

Close the books 4x faster, collect over 95% of receipts on time, and get 100% visibility over company spending.

Business spending includes different types of spend:

Strategic spend is usually centralized and managed by C-level executives with dedicated spenders. It can be managed through invoices, wire transfers and purchase orders.
Discretionary and operational spend is also centralized, but spending is done by managers and employees during their daily professional lives. It includes card purchases, subscription payments, digital ads, events, office orders, and business travel.
Expenses, unlike strategic spend, represent a significant amount of small purchases that can be difficult to track. These include card payments, expense claims, team perks, and travel expenses.

Spend management is the process through which companies manage business spending. It takes into account the end-to-end process when someone needs to spend: getting purchase approvals, providing payment methods, submitting and processing invoices, submitting and reimbursing expense claims, chasing receipts and invoices for reconciliation, and assigning the right analytical codes, expense accounts, and VAT rates to all those expenses for bookkeeping.

Spend management tools become necessary when the number of employees increases and the need for clear processes, better visibility and control starts to grow for finance teams.

Employees need flexible, user-friendly tools, in order to spend easily and be empowered to do their job.

That’s when Spendesk can be a good fit.

Spendesk provides payment methods for modern businesses, and a powerful platform for finance teams to manage spending. This includes debit cards to replace old-fashioned company credit cards, virtual cards for online purchases, and automated expense reports for unexpected payments.

For employees
Employees no longer need to spend out-of-pocket. They request funds for a particular purchase, and can use their Spendesk card or virtual card to execute the payment.

If for any reason the employee can’t use their Spendesk card, they snap a picture of the receipt via the Spendesk mobile app and create an expense claim on the spot. This is sent directly to their manager for validation, and on to the finance team.

For finance teams
Each employee has their own Spendesk profile and debit expense card. So unlike the company credit card, you always know who’s spending company money.

The platform lets controllers create spending limits and pre-approvals. C-Level executives or managers will have a different level of pre-approved spend from other staff. Should a team member need to go over their pre-approved budget, they can make a request to their manager via the mobile app or the platform online.

When an expense is made with a Spendesk card, the employee simply snaps a picture of the receipt at the time of purchase. Which means no more lost receipts.

Finance teams can see real-time company spend and follow up on missing receipts or invoices by sending reminders to employees via the platform.

Reviewing expenses is also easier as finance teams can group expenses and assign them the right VAT rates and expense accounts before exporting everything easily to their accounting tools.

Spendesk streamlines the whole business spending process, making spend management intuitive, simple and efficient.

KPI dashboards: what are they and how do you build one?

What are KPIs?

What is a KPI dashboard?

How to build a KPI dashboard

Tips for an effective KPI dashboard

Quick and easy KPI tracking

More reads on Finance tools & tech

CFO software: 22 tools recommended by finance experts

What is NetSuite? 4 advantages to using this popular ERP system

9 ready-to-use Notion finance templates

5 use cases and key benefits of RPA in finance

Get started with Spendesk