Balanced Scorecard Strategy For Dummies®

Chapter 10. Building the Financial Leg Dashboard

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• Leveraging the simplicity and power of dashboards

• Customizing financial dashboards to your needs

• Using your daily dashboard to help you

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A financial dashboard is just a Balanced Scorecard you use that tells you about your specific financial circumstance at a particular moment in time, just like your bank account statement. This dashboard contains the latest information — updated periodically — with enough detail to help you make decisions. By providing the latest information to you, financial dashboards enable you to choose appropriate actions to both avoid mistakes or errors in judgment and to make informed decisions for better results.

In this chapter, we discuss how financial dashboards extend the Balanced Scorecard, enable decisions, assist in assessing and decoding difficult business choices for competitive advantage. We also explore a variety of different examples.

The Basics of Financial Dashboards

The Balanced Scorecard provides you a vehicle by which you can make the best decisions, and track your progress toward achieving your business goals and objectives. It is an integrated road map (no, sorry, not a roadmap to the South of France), guiding you and enabling you to lead your organization, using a balanced approach focusing beyond financial performance and results.

Managing by scorecard alone, is, however, a very difficult and daunting task, as it truly encompasses multiple measures ...