Download How dashboards help businesses make decisions and why they are better than regular reports

A dashboard is a set of data visualizations (graphs, charts, diagrams, tables, etc.) obtained from third-party systems. Visualizations are grouped in such a way that they provide the most visual answer to a business question.

Unlike a static report, the dashboard changes along with the changing data. It contains interactive elements with which this data can be filtered and grouped. Of course, if the dashboard is created taking into account all needs and trends.

Today is the most important thing Dashboard Trends 2024 includes flexibility, variety and versatility. A well-designed dashboard not only visualizes numbers from reports, it helps solve a business problem, monitor the efficiency of business processes, find relationships between heterogeneous data, etc.

Dashboarding

Analysts use the term “dashboarding”. This is the name of an approach to building analytical systems, where the developer provides data for analysis and a tool for their visualization. It is up to the user to decide exactly how the data should be grouped and visualized.

The problem with modern companies is a large amount of data

Modern businesses are forced to collect large amounts of data on employee training, KPIs, sales levels, customer satisfaction, etc. All of this is building material from which a business development strategy can be built. Analysis of these figures will help you understand what processes are happening in the company, what affects what, and what steps you should take for further growth.

However, data processing in practice is a long, painstaking work, the result of which can only be understood by analysts. For companies using traditional methods, data analysis takes weeks. While their competitors spend seconds obtaining important information and gaining advantages in the battle for a place in the market.

Two solutions to the problem – fixed reports and dashboards

There are two solutions for data management: fixed reports with a limited range of settings and dashboards that provide access to data through an integration API.

Reports

One way to present data in an understandable way is to create a fixed set of reports that solve a clearly defined problem. This begs the question: who formulated this problem, is the formulation outdated, and what should be done when new data emerges or the interpretation of existing data changes?

In practice, even well-thought-out regular reports become outdated very quickly. As the business operates, new questions arise, the answers to which can be found in the data. To do this, however, you need to look at them from the right angle. You have to upload the data to Excel and process it manually. The process of manual data processing is always difficult and time-consuming.

Dashboards

Dashboards emerged in response to users’ need for visual and comprehensible analysis tools.

Managers don’t have time to study raw numbers or customize pre-configured reports. Instead, we need a business interpretation of the data, identifying relationships and patterns. At the same time, information should be presented simply and clearly.

If a company is launching product training, it wants to know how access to the market for new products has changed. Launching an onboarding and preboarding system – we need data on how the adaptation speed of newcomers has changed. There can be an infinite number of such situations, so a ready-made system cannot provide answers to all business questions.

Three main differences between a dashboard and a report

• A report is a preconfigured document with a limited number of parameters. A dashboard is an information panel with highly customizable logic for collecting and visualizing data, which can be easily changed by the user when the task changes;

• To extract useful information from a report, you need to study tables and analyze data. At the same time, there is a risk of errors due to the analyst’s banal inattention. The dashboard visualizes the necessary information in terms that the user already understands. You don’t need an analyst or developer to work with it. As a bonus, the dashboard data is always up to date, and not collected by someone a week ago and even manually corrected for some reason;

• Customizing reports is expensive and time-consuming. The dashboard is offered as a ready-made solution that can be adapted relatively easily without having the expertise of an analyst or developer.

Conclusion

Over time, dashboards began to replace regular reports. Not strange. A properly created dashboard allows you to process a huge amount of data and analyze it, which speeds up processes and makes business results more visual for further adjustments.

This post was last updated: 16 January 2024