A dashboard is a visual overview of the most important figures of an organisation or process, refreshed automatically from the source systems. The difference with a report: a dashboard is permanently up to date and interactive, rather than a snapshot that someone assembles by hand.
Dashboard in practice
A good dashboard answers one question per screen — how is the pipeline doing, are we hitting the margin, where is delivery getting stuck — and is built on a data model that combines the sources automatically. That does away with the monthly cut-and-paste work as well as the argument over whose Excel is the right one.
The best-known tools are Power BI (strong in data models and the Microsoft stack) and the free Looker Studio (strong in marketing and web data); the comparison is in Looker Studio vs Power BI. Want to feel how a live dashboard works? Our dashboards page has a working example.
Related terms
- BI — BI (business intelligence) is the collecting, combining and visualising of business data to base decisions on — usually in the form of dashboards and reports.
- KPI — A KPI (key performance indicator) is a measurable figure that shows how an organisation or process is performing on something that really matters — revenue per customer, delivery time, time-to-fill, error rate.
- Data model — A data model is the structure in which data and its mutual relationships are captured: which tables there are (customers, orders, products), which fields they contain and how they are linked together.