3 New Approaches for the Data Driven Chief Financial Officer
without any need for redoing the set up or the need to reconcile information between different
sources.
New Approach 3:
Implement dashboard reporting to monitor the financial pulse of the
family office
Executive dashboards are to businesses what cockpit control panels are to pilots. It's the business
equivalent of dials and meters, all designed to provide a user with a snapshot of the status of the
business using KPIs.
The KPIs should be a mix of
financial and non-financial
indicators, which means that
data from outside of the
financial system is leveraged
with financial data to provide a
more insightful perspective of
performance. This would
include information about
volumes, pricing, shipments,
utilization, etc. Most
organizations find they are
able to identify 8-10 key
performance indicators that
really drive performance and
these become the metrics that
populate the dashboard.
Modern dashboards are interactive for the user and add more value than a static printed
report. The true insight comes from a user's ability to drill into the various metrics on their screen
and interact with the underlying data. This data can be sorted, spliced, and drilled further, all the
way back to the transactional level, to give users a deeper and richer understanding of the
underlying cause and effect of what has happened.
Dashboards should drive management action and decision-making. When indicators fall outside
an acceptable tolerance range, dashboard indicators should make these deviations obvious to
the user.
