Dashboards to Manage Your Finances
One of the best tools to stay on top of your finances and also manage cash flow and profit and loss, are dashboards. Let me give a rundown of a few of these dashboards:
MyBizHomepage — MyBizHomepage is a free Web-based service that gives you financial analytics to run your business more profitably. It works along with QuickBooks. So if you use QuickBooks, it will extract data from your QuickBooks account and display it in a dashboard. It’s password-protected, so only you see your data — it’s your private dashboard.
ExcelWithMonarch — Organizations of all sizes can easily and quickly implement their own custom dashboard systems with software most every business already has: Microsoft Office Excel.
Using Datawatch’s Monarch software you can feed current data into Excel. Think of Monarch as a universal data translator. According to a Web comment by the owner of the ExcelwithMonarch site, by using Monarch and Excel, you “can extract data from report files, databases, PDFs and many other sources, and output to a number of formats, including Excel files. This really is a knockout combination as an organization can define exactly what content they need to see in their dashboard, how they want to visualize it (charts, tables, etc.), and (this is the best part) they can make the most of the software tools (accounting, ERP, etc.) they already use.”
Salesforce.com — If you are a user of Salesforce.com and you want to measure more than just your finances, the dashboards available with Salesforce.com are useful. You can have a dashboard to show critical metrics for sales and marketing, for instance.
Roll Your Own — This article at TechSoup outlines how you can create a customized dashboard using a portal software such as Microsoft’s Sharepoint.
