Role-based dashboards are an important asset provided by modern ERP systems. Acumatica, for example, an advanced cloud ERP, enables users to create, configure and maintain custom dashboards based on roles. They provide full visibility into areas such as accounting, operations and sales. Dashboards offer more than customizability, though. They can deliver a great deal of potential for your business. The following examples reveal the types of information and analytics you can obtain from fully centralized, role-based dashboards.
Accounting
A customized accounting dashboard lets viewers track finances and expenses via an itemized look at inventory. The dashboard is able to break down data into inventory received, returned and ready to ship. In the example below, a pie chart widget reveals the types of inventory received. There can also be information displayed on orders to ship along with account IDs, product descriptions and the date they were requested on.
Figure 1 – Sample role-based dashboard for accounting (Source: https://www.capterra.com.de/software/96371/acumatica-cloud-erp)
This dashboard maximizes the potential of your business to track, manage and replenish inventory to optimize costs, customer service and the supply chain. One can see purchase suggestions that identify individual products, the warehouses they came from and how many items need to be ordered. Item quantities and average costs are listed. Overdue purchase receipts, complete with promised dates of delivery and open quantities and amounts, are listed as well.
Operations
An operations dashboard can provide a complete overview to help track revenue, profits and new opportunities in real time. For example, the dashboard could show a 360-degree view of days-cash, cash flow projections, visualizations of orders to ship and volume shipped over time. Other widgets could reveal year-on-year revenue, an average invoice amount trend and website visits from a geographical perspective.
Other displays on an operations dashboard might include gross profits, operational costs by department, monthly revenues, cost of sales and gross profit. Users can instantly assess current and trending data about the current state of a business, its performance over time and new opportunities. Acumatica dashboards can be further customized to display various other data, including uptime/volume by location, expected shipment times and other insights on individual products.
Sales
Accurate, real-time sales data are imperative for effective management. For instance, with a data-rich sales dashboard, sales managers can instantly evaluate the performance of a sales team. Metrics on such a dashboard might include sales velocity, number of opportunities, average sales, win ratio and average days to close. They can also compare accrued commission and accrued sales on a monthly basis via graphical and numerical insights.
A sales dashboard can present a visual display of open opportunities. Account names are listed with specific opportunity names, estimated dates and quantity of items each opportunity includes. The total potential amount of each item is listed as well. There are also links to details on hot performers and who is getting cold, what they are selling and where the transactions are taking place.
The Importance of Dashboards
A role-based ERP dashboard allows stakeholders to gather and visualize performance metrics from across a business. Dashboards enable people in different roles to translate relevant, complex data, make important business decisions and better communicate information. The more detail, the better, plus Acumatica provides access to shared dashboards from a menu. Different layers of data can therefore be accessed quickly, providing instant insights into performance.
