More Thoughts on KPI Dashboards

We made another round of tweaks to our Google Spreadsheet KPI dashboard today, and I wanted to share them here. As you might remember, I’ve talked about using Google Spreadsheets for KPI dashboards two times before on this blog. My excitement for them hasn’t waned at all. Here are the next set of changes that we made:

• Added a new column where the rows represent the running average of each of the KPIs so we can see how our average compares to our goal
• Updated the cell conditional color coding so that values that are empty show up with a light gray background, but only if a value of zero isn’t allowed (e.g. one KPI is the average number of billable hours per person for our services team, which will never be zero)
• Took the average value from the first few weeks and made that our goal for this quarter, as our main task right now is establishing a baseline for the different KPIs

I encourage all entrepreneurs to start tracking different metrics in their business and capture them weekly in a color-coded spreadsheet.