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A window into the world of modern business operations

Managing a modern company is not a simple task. Not only do strategic questions and completely regular issues that need to be resolved quickly and for the best satisfaction of customers and employees crop up on a daily basis, what’s more, a good manager must always see a step or two ahead. This is only possible if we have access to accurate and up-to-date data on the operation of our company anywhere and anytime.

On the other hand, it is true that all of this is still also possible when taking the traditional approach, through regular meetings and personal reports from heads of sectors, as this also provides an idea of how the company operates. However, this is time consuming, and nowadays also an unjustifiable burden on human resources.

Questions and answers

There are also moments when we need a quick and data-supported response to completely specific questions. For example, how does the new marketing tool, a recent major investment, work in practice. What is the profitability of a specific product or service? What did employing a new worker in sales bring us? More about reports available at a click.

If we took the traditional approach, this would first entail ordering reports, allowing our subordinates certain time to prepare them, and finally finding the time for a meeting, as well as attending the presentations of the answers.

The digital age is slowly, but surely doing away with such methods. Today the analytical approach works in real time. Trends have been for some time forecasting dashboards that provide the management with key data through charts and visual counters – for example, monitoring the company’s cash flow. Instead of calling the accounting department, the dashboard can give you exact and up-to-date data on inflows and outflows every minute of the day. And not just that. It can also predict the future with a fair degree of accuracy. By utilizing artificial intelligence, it can calculate future payments by taking into account previous trends and delays. In the same way we can at any moment learn about up-to-date data on performance, with dedicated balance sheets and changes in sales.

The essence is in ... the data

We need data to make decisions. And even more essentially, we need to interpret them. We used to order them from specialized companies, paying them large sums to conduct research and prepare reports. Today this is still often required, however, much of the data we need is based on the company’s past performance.

It is true that these are usually dispersed across departments, and their aggregation again requires some additional work from our staff. Which once again brings us to reports (dashboards). They obtain the data directly from the company’s back end systems, combine it according to required parameters and display them in a visually clear method. Do we want to know the sales results for a specific sales person for the past two years? What about the other side, the customers? We can hardly claim to know even our most important customers until we can review the data on our mutual business history.

PANTHEON software supports dashboards, both the default ones, as well as the more advanced ones, tailored to a user’s needs. This is the modern format of displaying feedback on operations with a clear overview of the activities at the company and monitoring the effectiveness of every euro invested.

There are also other, perhaps less obvious, but nonetheless essential advantages of implementing such a reporting system. Among employees, dashboard use will initiate a groundswell of assuming responsibility for their work, as this is the most direct form of displaying the actual state. And this encourages employees to become more effective at their tasks, and the management to make more deliberate and better decisions.

An assured future manager

Finally, such a change in how we are informed will in time also foster a minute change in personality. Regularly reviewing the data and following trends using a dashboard could become a positive habit with an excellent side benefit. We will always have access to detailed and accurate starting points that ultimately lead to a higher quality of decisions.

A manager with a good overview of the situation will overcome their challenges with greater assurance. And what’s more, their chances to come out a winner become significantly higher. We discussed managerial and accounting benefits of dashboards at the PANTHEON Accountants’ Day conference, which took place on 23 January 2020 in Ljubljana.