In today’s data-driven business landscape, organizations rely heavily on accurate and real-time information to make informed decisions and drive growth. Performance dashboards, an important type of data dashboard, have emerged as a powerful tool to monitor, analyze, and visualize key performance indicators (KPIs) clearly and concisely.

This article explores the concept of performance dashboards, highlights different types of performance dashboards, and provides recommendations on utilizing dashboard software as a preferred solution for creating effective performance dashboards.

Financial Performance Dashboard (by FineReport)

1. What is the Performance Dashboard

A performance dashboard is a widely used management tool designed to facilitate the assessment of performance. It empowers business professionals to evaluate, oversee, and regulate key activities and processes crucial for achieving organizational objectives. This dashboard typically provides visual representations and real-time data to enhance decision-making and strategic planning.

Companies can use performance dashboards to guide a variety of metrics, from checking the performance of a department/individual to monitoring the availability of business strategies for the global organization.

These dashboards can be customized and created to address a diverse range of aims, ranging from evaluating the effectiveness of a global enterprise’s business strategy to monitoring a department’s progress towards meeting targets.

A performance dashboard offers three primary functionalities:

  1. Supervise critical business processes and activities by employing business performance metrics that promptly notify users about potential issues.
  2. Investigate the underlying causes of problems by delving into pertinent and up-to-date information.
  3. Administer individuals and processes to enhance decision-making and optimize overall business performance.
Performance Dashboard Example by FineReport
Performance Dashboard Example by FineReport

2. Performance Dashboard Examples

Here are some useful performance dashboard examples for you to explore.

Note: The performance dashboard examples shown in this article are developed by the professional dashboard software FineReport. FineReport has various types of built-in performance dashboard templates and FineReport is free for personal use. Free to download FineReport and give it a try!

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Also, if you want to watch more dashboard demos, you can check out FineReport Demo Platform.

2.1 Sales Performance Dashboard

This performance dashboard template is a valuable resource that provides all-encompassing sales insights. It helps identify and address inefficiencies, enhance sales team productivity, and sustainably increase profitability.

The primary objective is to elevate customer lifetime value and average revenue per unit while reducing acquisition costs. The provided indicators aid in achieving and maintaining these goals over time. This example demonstrates how the sales department’s performance can be visualized through a robust pipeline using simple sales charts. Whether you require weekly progress monitoring or strategic analysis, this data representation ensures you stay focused on the most crucial KPIs mentioned. Additionally, the visual aspect of interacting with online data visualization reinforces top departmental performance.

Sales Performance Dashboard Example by FineReport
Sales Performance Dashboard Example by FineReport

For more insights on these business performance template examples, explore our full range of sales dashboards.

2.2 Marketing Performance Dashboard

This template serves as a vital marketing example, driving success for numerous organizations.

With a marketing performance dashboard showcasing key metrics like impressions, clicks, acquisitions, and top campaigns, it offers comprehensive insights into your marketing efforts across various channels. This powerful tool enables you to create detailed marketing reports and maximize your return on investment (ROI). You can easily identify the best-performing campaigns and channels with the lowest cost-per-acquisition, allowing you to optimize future promotional activities.

By analyzing essential KPIs such as costs, marketing revenue and so on, this invaluable dashboard provides a deeper understanding of your marketing costs compared to actual expenses. It helps you gauge the effectiveness of specific initiatives and make necessary adjustments for optimal promotional success.

Marketing Performance Dashboard Example by FineReport
Marketing Performance Dashboard Example by FineReport

For more insights on these business performance template examples, explore our full range of marketing dashboards.

2.3 Financial Performance Dashboard

The finance department holds a critical role in the long-term success and financial stability of any organization, regardless of industry. This example of a financial report provides a comprehensive snapshot of your company’s capital structure and the management of existing assets.

A balance sheet offers a concise overview of your company’s assets and liabilities at a specific point in time.

This indispensable template focuses on monitoring two key ratios, namely return on assets and return on equity. These ratios ensure continuous control over your organization’s financial well-being, enabling the company to not only thrive but also navigate unexpected obstacles or challenges professionally and productively.

The presented financial graphs visually demonstrate the company’s growth in terms of capital and provide a general overview of the balance sheet. By closely examining these crucial financial indicators, you can promptly assess how your company’s assets are managed and make strategic adjustments as necessary.

financial performance dashboard example
Financial Performance Dashboard by FineReport

For more insights on these business performance template examples, explore our full range of financial dashboards.



2.4 Employee Performance Dashboard

It is undeniable (almost self-evident) that your employees are the driving force behind your organization’s success. Monitoring their performance and consistency is crucial for ongoing commercial achievements. This highly valuable business performance dashboard template is designed to assist you in effectively managing your staff.

The employee performance dashboard presents relevant metrics, including absenteeism rate, overtime hours, training costs, and more.

Our HR example focuses on employee performance and provides comprehensive information on key areas such as attendance, productivity, overtime, training costs, and other vital aspects of HR analytics. By gaining deeper insights into these facets of employee performance, you can identify trends, address inefficiencies, and enhance engagement where it may be lacking. For instance, you can assess workers’ motivation and engagement levels based on the absenteeism rate, tracking the data over five years as illustrated above. Additionally, you can measure productivity levels and tailor this indicator to suit specific needs, such as allowing employees to set their working hours to maximize productivity.

With this online dashboard, you gain the ability to motivate and inspire your employees, provide targeted training support, boost morale, reduce operational costs, and make strategic decisions that benefit both your organization and its workforce.

Employee Performance Dashboard by FineReport
Employee Performance Dashboard by FineReport

For more insights on these business performance template examples, explore our full range of HR dashboards.


2.5 Business Performance Dashboard

Business performance dashboards assist in the cohesive rather than fragmented analysis of critical datasets, which ultimately results in sustainable commercial success in a competitive digital landscape.

Business Performance Dashboard by FineReport
Business Performance Dashboard by FineReport
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3. How to Create a Performance Dashboard?

Microsoft Excel is an excellent application for tracking, managing, and analyzing performance. Many software programs specialize in dashboards, such as reporting tools, BI tools, etc. How could you choose the best tool for you?

If you are a student, I would recommend Excel as it is free and great for beginners to learn. The disadvantage is that it can’t handle large data volumes, and it’s more time-consuming.

If you are a business user and make dashboards for work, I suggest you choose a professional tool because the enterprise data volume is extremely large and requires better tool performance and development efficiency.



3.1 Create a Performance Dashboard in Excel

Microsoft Excel is an awesome application to track, manage and analyze performance.

Prepare & clean data

To create a performance dashboard in Excel, your data first needs to be imported into Excel. 

There are many ways to do this, with varying degrees of complexity. The simplest method is to copy and paste, but this method is very time-consuming if the amount of data is large.

If your existing spreadsheet is a bit disorganized, take some time to clean it up and make sure things are organized into the appropriate rows and columns. This step is the most troublesome and time-consuming.

Setup spreadsheets & charts

To create a dashboard, you need to have three separate worksheets (or tabs) in your Excel workbook. One worksheet is for saving raw data, one worksheet is for saving chart data, that is, only the data that needs to be entered into the different charts of the dashboard, and the last one is the dashboard tab where the various charts will appear.  

Excel has bar charts, bar charts, pie charts, line charts, scatter charts, waterfall charts, and more. You need to consider which charts to use to present your data and combine them for maximum effect.

I suggest you try creating a few different charts and look at the results to see which ones make the most sense for displaying your data in an easily digestible way.

Click the Dashboard tab of the worksheet, click the Insert button in the toolbar, and then select the type of chart you want from the menu.

Beautify, refine & repeat

You can beautify your chart by double-clicking on the chart area and then using the options on the toolbar to make changes.

A true Excel dashboard includes several different charts and gauges to display the data. So, to complete our dashboard in this example, we will go back and repeat all these steps for our other data columns.



3.2 Create a Performance Dashboard in Dashboard Software

I think it is wiser to use a professional dashboard tool to create a dashboard in the workplace.

First of all, dashboard software like FineReport supports multiple data access methods, you can import data from Excel files or link directly to your database. Because professional FineReport can support large data volumes, it is very efficient.

Secondly, FineReport has a large number of built-in charts and visual styles that you can simply apply to develop a variety of beautiful icons. FineReport supports more than 50 chart styles, covering all basic and high-level charts on the market, and also has excellent dynamic effects and a powerful interactive experience.

Various features can be set according to the needs during use, and can also be self-adjusted and displayed on the mobile terminal and large LED screen.

FineReport also has many built-in dashboard templates that have been developed, which are the samples I showed above, and you can use them directly after downloading the software.

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creat performance dashboard with FineReport
User-friendly Interface (from FineReport)

I think the best thing is that I can drill down and link the reports created by FineReport.

What are data drill-downs and linkage?

Drill-down is a reporting capability that allows the user to go from a more general view of the data to a more detailed view at the click of a mouse. For example, you can drill down on these 10 conversions from age, and then drill down on dimensions such as gender and device used.

performance dashbord with drilling down
Dashboard drilling down

With FineReport the canvas-style dashboard development interface is much simpler and easier to use, you don’t need to create multiple datasheets, just connect the data directly and drag and drop to work on it, if you are interested you can read this blog post-How Can Beginners Create a Great Dashboard?.



4. A Conclusion of the Performance Dashboard

In this post, I introduce the definition, and types of performance dashboards. I believe that performance dashboards are key to enterprise performance management and are a pivotal instrument in the digital transformation of enterprises. If you are a business user, welcome to FineReport, a professional, flexible, and powerful enterprise reporting tool.

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Feel free to make an appointment for a live demo with our product experts. We will be more clear about your needs and see how FineReport can help you and your organization transform data into value.

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