KPI Reports
Why are KPI reports so important?
Could one drive a car without all the gauges sitting by the steering wheel?
KPI reports are critical for the efficient management of any business. Understanding KPI reports is basically understanding how well a company is doing from controlling its costs to growing its profit.
The next question is how to create KPI reports! To answer that particular question it is important for the one who is going to create the report, not only to know what needs to be measured but also and most importantly to understand the necessary data. First of all knowing where to source the data, should it be on a server or within a Cloud application or as a simple flat file sitting on a shared storage. Second is to identify how the data needs to be structured to feed the indicators efficiently. Efficient visual reports or dashboards come from well-structured data.
KPI Template
KPI reports can meet the monitoring needs of many departments within a business. While some teams have a clear idea of how their report should look like and what indicators to include, others will need a KPI template to guide them. The purpose of a KPI template is to lay out critical indicators for a given purpose. The template is usually customized either by sector but most often by department type. Let’s look at the indicators or 4 KPI template examples:
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KPI report for finance: Working Capital KPI, Operating Cash Flow KPI, Payroll Headcount Ratio KPI, Return on Equity KPI, Accounts Payable Turnover KPI, Inventory Turnover KPI, Net Profit Margin KPI, Expense Management KPI.
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KPI reports for sales: Rate of Contact, Rate of Follow Up Contact, Clicks from Sales Follow-Up Emails, Usage Rate of Marketing Collateral, Opportunity-to-Win Ratio.
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KPI report for hr: HR Turnover, Time to fill, Actual versus budgeted cost of hire, Average interviewing costs, Female to male ratio, Average training cost per full time employee.
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KPI reports for logistics: On-Time Final Delivery, Inventory accuracy, Dock to Stock, On-Time Shipping, Order Accuracy.
Think of the KPI template as a KPI reports sample, download it and expand on it upon your own particular tracking needs.
KPI Dashboards & kpi Tracking
What is the definition of a KPI dashboard compared to a KPI report? KPI reports tend to be more static mostly composed of tables while KPI dashboards include dynamic indicators such as gauges and moving trends graphs. KPI dashboards are also by essence more interactive. At a click of a mouse, one can filter, zoom in, drill-down, and perform other similar data indicator manipulations.
Reporting modules attached to CRM or ERP systems such as Salesforce or QuickBooks are usually standard for all their users. KPI dashboards services become relevant when users of these systems are trying to mix and match data from these different sources showing them within the same graph or indicator.
KPI tracking is not an easy game as it involves pulling data from different systems and sources and prepping the data in such a way that users of this particular KPI report will perform the KPI tracking they need. Data can come from many different sources including complex databases such as Oracle or SQL Server.
Key performance indicators are displayed in KPI reports or KPI dashboards to allow the KPI tracking to be accessible regardless of the amount of work behind the scenes pulling and prepping the data for them.
Read more about KPI with our other guides :
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