Data is only important if you know how to use it. Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of numbers. To run your company successfully, you need to be able to make sense of those numbers, turn them into insights, and use them to make informed business decisions.
That’s where BigTime’s dashboards come in. Think of your dashboards as a blueprint for your business strategy – they arrange your data into clean, digestible visuals, so you can get an idea of your company’s performance and make informed decisions.
What Can Dashboards Do?
With BigTime’s dashboards, you have full control over the types of data you (or your staffers) can see. They’re customizable by design, meaning you can pick and choose what data they display. You have access to a tile library with dozens of data tile types to choose from, and can add up to six quick insight tiles and eight large data tiles to your dashboard.
With this feature, it’s possible to make multiple dashboards and share them with the specific staffers who will get the most use from them. For example: let’s say you want to empower your finance team with actionable data insights. You could build a dashboard with tiles displaying revenue, billable charges, and total profit data. In that dashboard’s settings, you can then give access rights to your finance team. BigTime allows you to create up to five dashboards that you can share with any of your firm's security groups.
This is just a bird’s-eye view of how dashboards work. Now, let’s take a look at how dashboards could help leaders take control of their data in the real world.
Dashboards in Action
Charlie Brown is the CEO of a high-powered architecture firm. He uses BigTime to track project progress, delegate tasks to staffers, and create invoices, among other things. In order to get more use from his data, he’s created a dashboard with tiles displaying his company’s total profit, upcoming projects, task status and A/R aging. He’s also added two quick-insight tiles to the right of his dashboard that show him the number of overdue tasks and underutilized staffers.
When he opens his dashboard, he immediately notices something is off in the Total Revenue tile. While revenue appeared to spike in March, the line graph shows a steep decline in the following months. If Charlie hovers his cursor over the graph, he’ll see a glimpse of the overall revenue each month.
A drop in profit is always concerning, so naturally Charlie wants to learn more about what happened between March and July. When he clicks directly on the Total Profit tile, he’s redirected to a detailed report of all the profit from that time period.
Here, Charlie can see that while his company invoiced for $2,103 in the month of March, it only invoiced $150 for the month of July.
With this knowledge, Charlie can then check how many billable hours were actually put towards tasks between those months. The issue may be that staffers have fallen behind in sending invoices, or that progress on tasks has slowed for some reason. In any case, Charlie now has the business insights he needs to get things back on track.
This is just one example of how BigTime’s configurable dashboards can give leaders power over their data. Keep reading to explore how configurable dashboards work, what they can do, and how you can get started using them.