Driving Performance for Private Equity Firms 10
Dashboards that incorporate color scaling, trend indicators, conditional highlighting, and sparklines help
focus a ention on areas for a user to drill deeper and develop insight (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Sample Dashboard
Real-time Trend Indicators
Dynamic Graphing
Collaborative Compliance
Interactive Charts with
Drill-down Capability
When the reports are converted from a static state to a dynamic state, users have a tool at their
fingertips to ask and answer their own questions.
Changing the Role of Finance Staff
The role of finance is to ensure that the data included on a dashboard has integrity and that the
right metrics are presented� The adoption of enabling technologies enhances reporting integrity by
maintaining the live connection to the underlying sources of data alleviating finance people of this
time-consuming activity. As a result, these types of technology change the role of how finance people
are deployed�
Finance resources spend less time gathering, reconciling, aggregating, and cleansing data� Their
contribution is upgraded and now begins emphasizing the review of data to identify errors, the analysis
of data to uncover insights, and establishing KPIs that measure and communicate performance� These
are all value-added activities that draw on experience and business expertise, less so on base data
manipulation and validation technical skills�
