Elevate Your Sage Intacct Dashboards
You’ve successfully gone live on Sage Intacct. All your history is loaded, you’ve closed your first month, produced beautiful financials, and now you get a chance to breathe. Congrats! You’re ready to throw your team a party and order a cake! Of course, the moment you start dreaming about which flavor cake you’re going to order, that department manager and CFO pop your cake/party dreams requesting those dashboards they saw during the demo. Go ahead, order the chocolate cake (tell them you read it on a blog and it’s part of the dashboard building strategy) and then let’s get to building some dashboards!
In this post we’ll give you a strategy for building dashboards and break out the methodology/science behind successful ones. You’ll come to find that while components by industry are certainly different, when you start to analyze the key data points each industry’s dashboard highlights, an easily identifiable set of themes lie behind each component. (For example each industry has some type of count – customers, student enrollment, visits, grants.) With that in hand, you’ll soon be well on your way to building your own company’s dashboard.
Strategy:
Because dashboards are so easy to build, it’s easy to take the approach of building first, however you’ll be better off if you take a step back and plan.
Prep: Order the cake.
Step 1: Interview the person you are building the dashboard for. Ask them what they need to know. Put yourself in their shoes and identify things you might want to know that would help you do your job better if you were them.
Step 2: List out all ideas (put them in Excel or a Google Doc).
Step 3: For each item in the list, brainstorm components for each of the things they want to track.
Step 4: Identify the why. Each component should serve a purpose and that purpose should be easily identifiable. If the purpose is weak remove it (or split into multiple grouped dashboards).
By the end of the strategy sessions you should have something like this:
Industry/Role Specific Samples:
No idea where to even begin? That’s okay. Here are some industry/role specific samples to give your brainstorming sessions some direction.
Schools:
AP/Purchasing Manager (VRM):
Learn more about the VRM module here.
Grants Manager:
Watch a demo of grants management here.
Building the Dashboards – Components Break Down:
Key Performance Indicators:
These usually fall into 4 categories of measures being tracked:
- Count – Number of Customers, Student Enrollment, Number of Visits, Number of Grants, etc. Dashboard users like to see these counts and know whether they are increasing or decreasing. An increase in customers, students, visits, or grants are all good things while a decrease may be a red flag.
- Computation per Unit (Revenue) – Average Revenue per Customer, Average Tuition per Student, Average Revenue per Clinician, etc. Dashboard users want to know what the revenue is for adding on a new count to the above.
- Computation per Unit (Cost) – Average Cost per Student, Cost per Acquisition, Cost per Clinic, Contract Amount by Vendor, etc. Your dashboard viewers will want to know the cost of each new unit.
- Business Overarching KPI – Monthly Recurring Revenue, Grant Revenue, Grant Expenditures. These metrics provide an overall view of how the company is doing. Are customers purchasing more products from you indicating they like your company and services/products you provide (MRR is going up)? Do you have more grant revenue? What’s important in order to know the state of the business?
Graphs:
Graphs are excellent for multiple comparisons. While KPI’s are strong in showing you a total and a comparison of a single data point, graphs are used to compare against budget, other dimension records (sales by item, popularity of programs, top customers), or time. For example, you may need a graph to analyze among all products you sell, which is generating the most revenue so you can invest more in improving it. Which is not so hot so you can find out why? A graph could even indicate how each grant’s expenses stand in relation to budget (are you spending too fast? or too slow?).
Learn more about creating graphs here.
Reports:
These usually fall into 3 categories of measures being tracked:
- Comparison with Visual Indicators – Budget vs. Actual or Grant Position are great examples. Visual Indicators are an excellent way to grab your dashboard users attention to provide them vital information. Learn more about them here.
- Top 3, 5, or 10 – Top 10 Customers, Top 5 Grants, etc.
- Financials – Income Statement/Statement of Activities, Balance Sheet/Statement of Financial Position.
Lists:
Lists should be actions that your dashboard user needs to take. Lists should never overpower a dashboard. Nothing kills a dashboard from ever being opened again quicker than piling it full of list views. Nobody wants to see that. They will avoid it like the plague.
- Upcoming Deadlines – Contracts Expiring in 45 days, W9’s Past Due, Grant Deadlines.
- Approvals – Purchasing Approvals, Journal Entry Approvals, Accounts Payable Approvals.
Interested in recruiting our team’s help in building out your dashboards? Reach out to us here!
Kathy Jastrzebski is a manager with CLA’s Intacct team. CLA is an Intacct Premier Partner with a partnership that spans over 20 years and more than 1,000 successful implementations. Kathy brings five years of accounting experience along with seven years of Sage Intacct implementation experience. Along with her accounting experience, she has a passion for leveraging technology to lead finance teams worldwide through system implementations with a mission of increasing department efficiency through business process improvements.
This information is excellent. I am a current Intacct user ( user for 3 years) and these newsletters are so helpful. I have a question about the Grant Manager Dashboard. You have a section that shows attached documents under “My Grant Documents”. How were you able to accomplish this? Thank you.