There’s no doubt that the advent of financial dashboards has changed the game for business owners. These systems, powered by financial reporting automation and integrated with platforms like Xero and MYOB, have made financial data infinitely more digestible and enabled business owners to get a real grip on their numbers.
Time and time again, I’ve seen how, with a central source of reporting and business insights at their fingertips, business owners become more invested in their business’s financial health; more accountable; more capable of making data-driven business decisions.
The merits of putting real-time business insights in the hands of business owners is widely publicised. What’s not, is the value financial dashboards offer the broader team—not just those at the pinnacle of the pyramid, but your entire staff body.
A well-considered dashboard strategy can be one of your most powerful tools in uniting your staff behind the business’s financial goals.
And this is important, because at the end of the day, a business’s ability to achieve its financial goals is either helped, or hindered, by its people. When your employees understand the big-picture objectives, and the direct impact they personally have on achieving them, that’s when everyone starts rowing in the same direction. With the whole team on the same team, you’ll see stronger outcomes, faster.
Note the use of ‘well-considered’ in ‘well-considered dashboard strategy’. The suggestion certainly isn’t to open access all the way up—equipping everyone in your organisation with their very own dashboard. Nor is it to offer up a complete view of the business’s entire financial picture.
In my experience, it’s expanding dashboard access to the manager-level faction of the business that can provide the most benefit. The conduit between strategic planning and action, managers and supervisors yield a huge amount of influence. They’re the ones who set the tone for the broader team; the ones who are uniquely positioned to influence how financial decisions are understood and acted on in the day-to-day.
If your managers aren’t engaged with your business’s financial story (what you’re trying to achieve and why this matters for everyone in the business), or don’t have the tools they need to bring their team into this story, getting the momentum your financial strategy needs to thrive becomes near-impossible.
Dashboards help prevent the erosion between objective and action by turning financial strategy into something managers can see, understand, and act on. And when managers have that clarity, it naturally trickles down to their teams.
I’ve seen this play out over and over. One experience that comes to mind is that of a large wholesale business, which at the time, was struggling to maintain healthy gross profit margins as sales began to dip. The owner wanted to incentivise the sales team to improve margins but found it difficult to show them, in practical terms, how their pricing decisions affected overall performance. Sharing the monthly written financial reports with the sales managers did little to help, namely because the numbers felt abstract and out of touch with the team’s lived experience. The numbers didn’t feel real to them, so they didn’t trust what they were seeing.
To help bridge the gap between the top-line numbers and day-to-day decisions, we stepped in, building a dashboard that connects directly to their ERP system and automates data reporting. Each morning, the sales managers could see exactly how their department had performed the previous day: total sales, gross profit margin, and how close they were to their weekly target. By midweek, they could make small, informed adjustments. Deciding, for instance, whether the strategic choice would be to take more sales at a slightly lower margin because they were already well on track to hitting their targets.
It didn’t take long to see the impact this had within the business. The morning review fast became a habit, and something the sales team, who love the art of deal-making, genuinely enjoyed. Part of this too, can be attributed to the daily cadence of the reports. For the team, having real-time data access stirred up their motivation in ways that even the most engaging monthly reports can’t, purely because of the longer lag between action and outcome.
What made the biggest difference for that business wasn’t the dashboard itself, but the conversations it prompted. The daily review became a shared ritual. Instead of waiting until month-end to discuss results, managers and their teams were talking about performance every morning: what worked, what didn’t, and what needed to change that day.
Those small conversations build whole-organisation financial literacy in a way that formal reporting never can. People start connecting the dots on how price impacts margin, how wastage affects cashflow, how a slow day in one department puts pressure on another. Over time, the team develops a stronger commercial instinct. They begin to think less about tasks and more about outcomes.
That’s the real power of dashboards—they help embed financial thinking across the business. When your people understand the story behind the numbers, you don’t have to constantly remind them what the targets are. They already know, and they can see how close they are to hitting them.
I’ve seen the integration of financial dashboards have this same effect in businesses of all shapes, sizes, and industries. For another manufacturing client, for example, we built dashboards to provide insights into production. These allowed supervisors to monitor production efficiency and input costs. If labour hours start to creep up, or a supplier price spikes, they’d know right away. That visibility means issues can be addressed before they have a chance to cause more serious problems.
With this, dashboards change the nature of accountability. And not because everyone’s looking at the same screen. In fact, the most effective dashboards are those designed around the information that matters most to the person using them.
For a sales manager, that might mean a daily view of margin performance and product mix. For a production supervisor, it might be labour efficiency or input costs. And for the business owner, it’s the consolidated picture of how each department is contributing to overall performance.
When each area head is equipped with data-driven insights that are relevant to their role and team, alignment starts to build naturally. People can see the numbers that matter to them, and they can act on them with confidence. It also changes the tone of the conversations that happen across the business. Instead of reactive discussions about what went wrong last month, you start having proactive discussions about what can be done differently today.
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