Top 3 Reasons Small Businesses Need a Financial Dashboard
2/24/11 at 4:27 PM by Tony Lael 
In the last two years we’ve been involved in providing thousands of small business owners with access to the tools and resources they need to enhance the performance of their companies. We have had the honor of being on the front lines with business owners in companies who make anywhere from $100,000 to $30M in annual revenues.
Accounting software is not best tool for management analysis
Most micro businesses (companies with 1-3 people) often watch their business finances using their checking account at their bank, but most small businesses larger than that use some form of accounting software.
Accounting software (like QuickBooks, Peachtree, SAGE Great Plains and MYOB) used to be the only place to tell you how your company was doing financially. It helps you track debits and credits and is great for providing information for your tax return. Accounting software is not designed to give you an easily accessible financial picture of where your business is going, how you are doing compared to your industry and what financial hurdles are you about ready to face while driving to accomplish goals you have set for your business. The technology (like Corelytics) is available today to easily plug into your accounting software and give you access from a Management viewpoint, not just an Accountant’s viewpoint.
Spreadsheets destroy time
You shouldn’t need to spend hours looking at performance to know where your business stands and what issues might be coming at you soon. Understanding your financial picture should not require you to be fluent in spreadsheetology. Dashboards like Corelytics help you glance at your financial picture without spending a lot of time and money on complex spreadsheets or having a bookkeeper translate the reports they have set up for you to look at.
We can no longer afford to drive blind
In this era of global financial unrest, we can no longer afford to not understand the financial engine that sustains our business. First understand that accounting is not business finance. To use the analogy of driving a car; accounting is the amount of fuel you have left in your gas tank, it’s the RPMs of the engine, and the oil level – business finance is you sitting in your car looking out the windshield driving down the road. You don’t need to know everything that is going on with the car as you drive, you do need to glance at the gauges and make sure everything is operating smoothly.
A dashboard like Corelytics is the instrument you constantly monitor as you drive your business down the road. I would really enjoy hearing your opinions on these topics.
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As a CPA and Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor I understand the importance of getting timely key information to the decision makers. Both Intuit and Sage have incorporated rudimentary dashboard capabilities into their 2010 and 2011 versions but they lack some of the key features that seem to be included in the Corelytics Dashboard most notably the goals section and the leading indicators section. As fate would have it I just recently landed a new client who is an IT Service Provider – perfect timing. I will be in touch as soon as I get their books cleaned up – probably around the end of March.