It might seem entirely obvious that in order for an organisation to be effective it must have accurate visibility of its business performance at all times, however when conducting research for our Intelligent Business Index we found that well over half (62%) of UK SMEs have no real idea of the health of their business.
A risky move when making valuable business decisions based on inaccurate data, surely?
To gather information for the Intelligent Business Index we quizzed over 200 UK SMEs on how they monitor, analyse and manage their own performance.
The results provided us with real insight into how businesses make their decisions and the accuracy of the data they use to base these decisions on.
From what we can see, with little accurate insight into the health of their business UK organisations are living under an illusion and are putting themselves at risk. Two-thirds of businesses that we spoke to (67%) believe their decisions are based on up-to-date information, even though 60% of them admit they only update the information once a month! If you had a serious business decision to make, wouldn’t you want to be doing so with up-to-date information?
An even bigger concern is that 6% have admitted to never be looking at their accounts at all.
This percentage might sound small, but it is in fact representative of 300,000 UK companies that may be all dangerously unaware of the real state of their business, 5.2m businesses as of November 2014, 99.9% being SMEs.
So how are these businesses monitoring KPIs, and what needs to change going forward?
Firstly, more often than not the information shared throughout management teams is done so using manually updated Excel spreadsheets (51%). So, by changing to a real-time reporting process, like the ClicData Dashboard which provides teams with self-updating reports and shared workspaces, you can save time and be confident in knowing that the information presented is as up to date, and therefore as reliable as possible. Secondly, many of these teams have no understanding of the information documented within these reports (34%), so making them easy to absorb and digest is essential.
As businesses grow larger and move towards outsourcing their financial support this lack of understanding only gets worse. Our research highlighted a staggering 83% of decisions makers in larger SMEs lack an understanding of their company accounts – and these are the individuals making all the decisions!
In a country where SMEs employ 60% of the workforce and generate close to 50% of the turnover of all private enterprises, it really is unimaginable to think that most do not have access to live information to make the decisions to determine their own future.
Even when information is supposedly ‘live’, there is a clear opportunity for SMEs to improve how this information is packaged and presented in order to educate key stakeholders and give them clear guidance on the appropriate actions to take.
Our goal in creating the Business Intelligent Index is to give SMEs a quick and easy way to assess the health of their business, as well as providing a few simple steps to improve their means of monitoring business performance.
And by the way, if you never had the opportunity to use a dashboard solution before, ClicData is free for you to try. Don’t hesitate to register for an account and contact us if you need help to setting up your first dashboard.
Happy Dashboarding!
