Utilize The Effectiveness Of Professional Executive Dashboards & Reports

In the digital age, brands, businesses, and organizations have a wealth of knowledge at their fingertips: a level of insight that, if harnessed the right way, has the power to offer a real competitive edge while sparking innovation, inspiration, and creating an ever-evolving, well-oiled commercial machine. Business executive dashboards and reporting make this level of competitive advantage possible and provide business-boosting benefits across the board. But how so?

We are indeed living in a time rich in invaluable digital data. By gaining the ability to gather, organize and analyze the metrics that are most important to your organization, you stand to make your empire more intelligent than ever before – and executive reporting and business dashboards will help you do just that.

Moreover, such dashboards will create a data-driven environment where you and your team will be able to utilize a modern dashboard creator, automation, and intelligent solutions that will increase productivity and save countless dollars.

To put the importance, functionality, and organizational benefits of data analysis into perspective, here, we’re going to explore the value of executive dashboard templates, offering an insight into what they are, why they work, and look at real-life executive report examples created with a modern online reporting tool.

But first, let’s walk through a practical definition.

What Is An Executive Dashboard?

An executive dashboard is a reporting tool used by c-level professionals to track critical KPIs to efficiently manage business operations. Armed with powerful visualizations, executives can analyze data and make smart strategic decisions to reduce risks and ensure growth.

Modern executive reporting consolidates key metrics while outlining problems and solutions in which KPI dashboards are used to provide additional insights and serve as an added visual representation that usually lacks in executive reports and summaries.

The accessible visual nature of executive reporting means that it’s easy to make sense of specific datasets, spot ongoing trends and take a number of decisive actions that ultimately benefit the business, often in real-time. Primary areas are enhanced, with the aim of identifying weaknesses as well as strengths, improving internal processes, boosting staff engagement, improving service, raising productivity, and making the organization more profitable.

Executive dashboards solutions work by connecting relevant sources of information with the internal systems currently used within the company – platforms such as accounting software, your customer relationship management (CRM) program, email networks, and in-built website analytics, among others.

Through those connections, your reports pull all of this information into a single location, empowering you to view your business’s most important insights without logging into multiple platforms or systems. Moreover, executive reporting and dashboards also allow you to set targets, work with specific KPIs, and tailor them to best suit the needs, aims, goals, and mission of the company.

The point is, the information transmitted to the brain is better perceived when it's visually appealing, in fact, 65% of the population are visual learners. And, given the fact that people following directions with illustrations do so 323% more efficiently than those who follow text-only directions, agile executive dashboards are a powerful tool in today’s competitive commercial landscape.

Explore 20 Great Executive Dashboard Examples

There’s no doubt that executive dashboards are powerful tools that can streamline every area of your business. If you follow best practices and work with the right tools, these reports will accelerate the growth of your company significantly.

To demonstrate this, we’re going to look at a range of examples that focus on areas of the business related to the roles of CMO, CFO, CTO, and COO, as well as industries including SaaS, retail, and manufacturing. 

These 20 visual executive report examples will demonstrate the function and value of a professional dashboard designer in a real-world business context.

1. Management KPI Dashboard

The management KPI dashboard hones in on revenue on a consumer-based level while offering insights on the cost of new customer acquisition.

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By offering a mix of actual revenue metrics based on specific frames in addition to comprehensive information concerning revenue development, this management report is an invaluable way to spot real-time trends, make significant economic enhancements and set tangible sales targets.

Moreover,  the detailed customer-centric information served up by this dynamic management dashboard will give you a better understanding of promotional activities including cross-selling, upselling, or the overall value of your service on an individual basis. When it comes to driving down acquisition costs, developing your service, and boosting your profitability, these KPIs and metrics are essentially gold dust.

Primary KPIs:

• Sales Target
• Customer Lifetime Value
• Customer Acquisition Costs

2. Executive Financial Dashboard For CFOs

CFOs have a demanding task to make sure the financial situation of a company is progressing and has positive results. Focused on the strategic initiatives of the financial department, critical for ensuring the company has insights into the most important high-level financial charts and metrics, such an executive dashboard template provides many opportunities to dig deeper into the data and generate actionable insights. Let's take a closer look at an example.

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This executive KPI dashboard hones on the 4 most relevant areas of performance that Chief Financial Officers find helpful in their strategic monitoring: costs, sales goals, gross profit, and satisfaction levels of customers and employees. The latter are not financial metrics per se, but they are included since CFOs need to know how the customers and the team are performing - if the satisfaction levels are decreasing, they will certainly affect the finances as well. That's why C-level management needs to monitor these indicators to ensure that every person that is critical for keeping the company's financial health is satisfied and reacts immediately - if not.

The focal metrics on the left side of this CFO dashboard depict the financial development within the first quarter of the year and you can immediately spot that operating expenses don't perform quite well in comparison to other executive reporting dashboard metrics such as the net income or revenue. In this case, it makes sense to identify what exactly caused this increment in expenses and adjust your strategies accordingly.

Primary metrics:

• Berry Ratio
• Economic Value Added (EVA)
• Employee and customer satisfaction

3. Financial Overview Dashboard

Another example that focuses on the financial activity at a top level, offers a panoramic snapshot of gross profit margin, operating expenses (OPEX) ratio, earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) margin, and net profit margin, as well as a host of additional relevant insights.

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These financial KPIs are often determined from the income statement and not only provide a viable means of streamlining your organization’s financial processes, but also present opportunities to improve the overall financial structure of your business’s financially-driven operations.

By creating such a financial dashboard, you will not only have the possibility to automate many calculations but focus on what the data is telling you and provide opportunities to react quickly and on point.

Primary KPIs:

• Net Profit Margin Percentage
• Operating Expenses Ratio

4. Investor Relations Dashboard

The investor relations dashboard, and a third of our executive report examples, is pivotal in quantifying your business’s operational KPIs while calculating and communicating top-level metrics based on the company’s overall situation. This level of insight is key in keeping track of the major investors that could make or break your business’s success.

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In addition to a host of invaluable equity and assets-centric information, this third of our executive dashboard examples also gives an insight into your company’s share price, the first line of call in finance, and a near-absolute indication of the success of your company.

Primary metrics:

• Return on Assets
• P/E Ratio
• Return on equity

5. CTO Dashboard

As modern problems require modern solutions, CTOs have the responsibility to provide solutions and look after the technological and IT-relevant data and growth. By developing an executive reporting dashboard that helps in managing and consolidating data from multiple touchpoints, managers from the IT department or company can have a birds-eye overview of the most important IT strategies and immediately act upon issues.

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In information technology, it's critical to have access to the most up-to-date and important data that will enable CTOs to make the best possible decisions and improve departmental performance. A solution such as the CTO dashboard above will serve as a single point of truth for the most critical IT data and strategic development.

The dashboard above was designed focusing on 3 main sections: learning, internal, and finance/customers. Each section has its distinctive performance insights and underlines relevant metrics. In the learning part of this IT executive dashboard, the focus is on learning, where the restore success rate, reopened tickets, team attrition rate, and critical bugs will tell you how well the team learns from mistakes and whether they need more support. In this case, you can see that almost all areas are marked green, except for one, which ultimately means that the teams' performance is quite good.

In the next part of the dashboard, which focuses on finance and customers, CTOs have the possibility to take a closer look at expenses, users, and the net promoter score. These metrics will help executives to connect additional information outside of the specific IT indicators in order to paint a more detailed and profitable picture. In other words, if users and customers are not satisfied and if costs keep piling up, it might make sense to investigate further because the IT department could experience additional issues. To learn more about how you can improve customer support processes and connect to other critical departments within a company, we suggest you visit our Zendesk dashboard page.

Primary KPIs:

• Number of Critical Bugs
• Reopened Tickets
• Accuracy of Estimates
• Net Promoter Score

6. SaaS Management Dashboard

The next of our executive dashboard examples is dedicated to software as a service (SaaS). Covering all of the key aspects of top-level SaaS management, this most dynamic of templates offers a comprehensive birds-eye view of your entire operation.

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Each KPI within this interactive reporting tool works cohesively to deliver a balanced mix of visual information that drills down into customers, recurring revenue, and costs.

With critical metrics including MRR, APRU, customer lifetime value, and customer acquisition costs, our SaaS reporting dashboard will not only help you improve the efficiency of your software as a service offering, but you’ll also be able to meet the ever-evolving needs of your customers on a sustainable basis. A powerful BI tool for any ambitious modern tech organization.

Primary metrics:

• Customer Acquisition Costs
• Customer Lifetime Value
• ARPU
• MRR

7. CMO Dashboard

Amongst the best dashboard examples for senior-level decision-makers, our CMO marketing dashboard offers access to a wealth of invaluable information at a quick glance.

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Serving up five effective KPIs in a logical, digestible format, including numeric representations and line charts, this most inspirational of executive dashboard examples offers a wealth of insight in an easy-to-access, centralized space.

As an essential and all-encompassing field, digital marketing is integral to the growth and evolution of any modern organization, regardless of industry. Here, you can drill down into every vital aspect of your marketing performance while spotting integral trends both historically and in real time. By gaining access to such invaluable data, you can improve your responsiveness while formulating improved marketing reports and strategies that will increase your audience while boosting your return on investment (ROI).

Primary KPIs:

• Sales Target & Growth
• Website-Traffic-to-Lead Ratio
• Cost per Lead
• Lead-to-MQL Ratio
• MQL-to-SQL Ratio

8. Sales KPI Dashboard

The last (but certainly not least) of our executive summary dashboard examples is our sales KPI report. Naturally, sales are essential to almost every business, regardless of sector, which means working with the right sales KPIs is vital to your ongoing growth and success.

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Offering a comprehensive panorama of the practical information required to make sales activities perform to their optimum capacity, this is amongst our most comprehensive executive summary dashboard examples. The range of sales graphs and charts included within this report provides a wealth of information that will vastly improve the internal efficiency of your sales department while helping to reduce costs, improve output, and ultimately, boost your organization's bottom line.

This reporting tool empowers sales managers and executives to compare a range of metrics and identify where and how to make strategic adjustments that optimize the end results. Keeping your sales initiatives on the right track will contribute to your business’ success year after year - and this is the very tool for the job.

Primary metrics:

• Revenue per Sales Rep
• Customer Churn Rate
• Upsell & Cross-Sell Rates
• Profit Margin per Sales Rep
• Incremental Sales by Campaign

9. Executive Manufacturing Dashboard

Another effective executive management dashboard that serves as a template for high-level managers brings vital strategic indicators into a single point of access. Designed as a KPI scorecard, this dashboard will make sure that manufacturing executives have a clear overview of the effectiveness, quality, production, and costs.

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The first part, called the effectiveness area, demonstrates the performance of critical metrics such as the overall operations effectiveness, equipment, total effective equipment performance, and capacity utilization. These indicators, created with BI dashboard software, will help manufacturing leaders compare the development of the current month with the previous and see if there are any issues in the production process and if there are needs for additional adjustments.

Other parts are structured similarly, but with different metrics and points in mind: C-level managers in the manufacturing industry should have an overview of the quality and performance where you can monitor the production volume, performance, and on-time delivery. That will help in assessing whether the products are delivered on time, and compare the findings with the previous period, in this case, a month.

Finally, the last part of this executive dashboard report indicates the development of costs and revenue, showing the relation between the current and the previous month. Such data is important to control regularly since it can affect other metrics on this dashboard; if the production volume and production time increase, they can directly cause an increment in costs.

Primary KPIs:

• Overall Operations Effectiveness (OOE)
• Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)
• Total Effective Equipment Performance (TEEP)
• Capacity Utilization

10. COO Dashboard For Executives

This high-level executive dashboarding visual is designed for Chief Operating Officers that need to have a strong operational presence and control. In order to optimize business operations, COOs need to keep up with fast-paced environments and ever-changing situations that need data yesterday. That's why a dashboard that is generated with the help of self-service BI has enormous support power for data-driven COOs and the ones that strive to become one.

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When you consider the logistics industry, COOs need to have a reliable outline of business operations and quickly identify the potential for growth. As depicted in our example above, transportation management is one of the most critical parts of logistics, where delivering products in the most effective way possible is a significant component of our cutthroat economy.

In essence, this COO dashboard displays fleet efficiency, average loading, time and weight, delivery status, and deliveries by destination. These metrics will help executives to assess the health of the transportation processes and whether there is space for improvement. If you spot any irregularities such as an increase in the loading weight and transport, you might want to consider whether this is going to cause potential accidents on the road. The point is to optimize your metrics and operations but not overstretch them so that you confront serious operational issues.

Primary metrics:

• Delivery Time
• Transportation Costs

Now that we listed the top examples, we will take a closer look at the benefits of such dashboards and why you should utilize them.

11. Financial Performance Dashboard

Designed for busy CFOs who are juggling many fiscal plates while making a series of pressing decisions on a regular basis, our visually balanced financial performance dashboard provides the essential metrics for ongoing growth and success.

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This dashboard serves up a clear-cut snapshot of how efficiently your business spends its capital while providing a wealth of at-a-glance information that helps maintain fiscal balance and make confident strategic choices, even under pressure.

With three core executive dashboard metrics at your disposal, it’s possible to drill down into your return on various assets as well as equity and keep track of your working capital. Armed with this melting pot of financial KPIs, you can maintain a harmonious financial structure, manage internal as well as external stakeholder relationships, and improve your company’s monetary efficiency while maintaining optimum productivity levels at all times. This dynamic BI finance tool is a chief financial decision-maker data-driven Swiss army knife.

Primary KPIs:

• Return on Assets
• Return on Equity
• Working Capital

12. Talent Management Dashboard

Poor recruitment choices or talent retention strategies can drain company budgets and stunt organizational progress. As an HR manager, one of your main concerns will be sourcing, developing, and maintaining the staff that pushes your company forward. But while the aim here is clear, getting it right is sometimes an uphill battle.

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Designed to help HR-based executives maintain healthy staff retention and recruitment initiatives, our talent management dashboard offers a melting pot of metrics that simplify benchmarking turnover rates, monitoring satisfaction levels, and accessing a wealth of high-level hiring stats.

Designed for maximum access to information, this highly intuitive HR analytics dashboard offers the tools to understand how long your talent has been at the company while categorizing their most valuable skill sets. You can also compare firing rates while analyzing key trends in overall staff satisfaction levels and explore correlations to your talent turnover rates for specific time periods. With this breadth of information at your fingertips, you can create strategies to keep your most important talent engaged in the business while developing initiatives to streamline the hiring process and source skilled professionals in the areas you need them most. This is a dashboard that will save HR seniors time while significantly improving your return on talent investment.

Primary metrics:

• Talent Satisfaction
• Talent Rating
• Talent Turnover Rate
• Dismissal Rate

13. Hospital Performance Dashboard

Business intelligence in healthcare has become a critical element for efficient facility management. If you’re a key healthcare decision-maker, you know that many of your decisions affect the health and well-being of your patients. In some cases, the strategies and initiatives you develop or sign off on can make the difference between life and death.

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As one of our most vital executive summary dashboard examples, this hospital dashboard is equipped with a balanced mix of logical visualizations that will ultimately improve patient care while creating interdepartmental efficiency, reducing any unnecessary operational costs or expenditures.

From this informational hub, you can gain swift access to information that will empower you to assess nurse-to-patient ratios according to shift, treatment costs according to age group, readmission rates, length of stay, and patterns in hospital-acquired infections.

By analyzing this detailed information from one central executive summary dashboard, you can get under the skin of your hospital, honing in on any operational weaknesses in the process. If there’s an issue arising, you can tackle it head-on before it gets out of hand. And if you identify any positive trends, you can use that information to make improvements in other areas of your institution.

Primary KPIs:

• Average Hospital Stay
• Hospital Readmission Rates
• Costs By Payer

14. Customer Satisfaction Dashboard

In our hyper-connected digital age, consumers are in the driver’s seat. With access to a wealth of information and potential buying power at the swipe of a screen or the click of a button, offering a consistent, meaningful, and seamless customer experience (CX) will set you apart from the pack.

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To keep your customers consistently happy, working with the right customer service analytics tool is essential - and as one of our most amenable executive dashboard samples, this customer satisfaction dashboard will steer you toward consistent consumer-facing success.

With a cohesive mix of metrics designed to offer a deeper understanding of your customer’s satisfaction rates, this dynamic executive dashboard template offers a clear-cut snapshot of your net promoter score (NPS), as well as a comparable rundown of your consumer retention rates in one easy-to-navigate space. Here, you can also discover how easy or difficult it is for your customers to navigate your website or use your services (this is a particularly useful function or metric for SaaS companies).

With this comprehensive mix of insights at your disposal, you can make targeted improvements to your customer service process and communications while making valuable tweaks to the online experience you offer consumers across channels. This powerful executive project dashboard will improve your customer retention rates, grow your business, and boost your bottom line.

Primary metrics:

• Customer Satisfaction
• Net Promoter Score
• Customer Effort Score
• Customer Retention

15. Procurement KPI Dashboard

Niche, sector, or industry aside, your procurement activities can have a significant impact on the rest of your business. If you have a poor procurement strategy, you run the risk of draining your business budgets, creating supply chain inefficiencies, and even suffering reputational damage.

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As a procurement chief, it’s your goal to keep your processes fluent, your compliance rates healthy, and your supplier relationships valuable. It’s a colossal task, but as the most versatile of executive dashboard templates, our procurement KPI dashboard will help you achieve it.

One of the key features of this particular is the ability to dig deeper into your end-to-end procurement process - or procurement cycle. Armed with this visual information at all times, it’s possible to pinpoint specific inefficiencies and streamline the entire process. If you have a problematic supplier, for instance, you could set new procurement terms or replace them with a more reliable company, saving money and improving procurement productivity in the process.

This is an executive dashboard example that was created with modern procurement analytics software and it demonstrates just how much scope and vision working with the right high-level analytic tools offers. 

Primary KPIs:

• Compliance Rate
• Number of Suppliers
• Purchase Order Cycle Time

16. Retail Analytics Dashboard

Retail is a competitive landscape. If you want to stand out in your niche, the perfect combination of cross-channel promotional strategies, creativity, and organizational efficiency is essential. This executive monthly report will help you do just that.

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From marketing campaigns to sales, staffing strategies, and beyond, modern retail managers or executives have a huge daily task on their hands. Part executive sales dashboard, part executive marketing dashboard, and part operational dashboard, our retail analysis tool serve up a wide range of essential insights in one digestible space.

Here, it’s possible to explore both web traffic and foot traffic patterns, track correlations between investments and returns, examine employee revenue rates, and gain a deeper understanding of sell-throughs and conversions. 

Every strand of the information featured in this retail-based dashboard executive summary will help you meet the needs of your consumers head-on while building brand authority and boosting your overall return on investment (ROI).

Primary metrics:

• Website Traffic/Foot Traffic
• Sell-through Rate
• Retail Conversion Rate
• GMROI
• Monthly Revenue Per Employee

17. Actual vs Forecast Financial Executive Dashboard 

Arguably one of the most important areas for the CFO, this financial executive dashboard uses forecasting technologies to predict how the financial situation of the organization will look in the future. This is done by using a mix of current and past data, and it is highly used by decision-makers to define budgeting goals and other important processes for the coming fiscal year. Let’s look into it in a bit more detail below.  

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The template is a different take on an income statement, tracking three key areas for the finances department: revenue, costs, and net profit for the past 12 months. Each of these indicators provides insights into the actual and forecasted values as well as the absolute difference in money and a percentage. This allows c-level professionals to quickly understand if the numbers are going as expected or if something needs to be changed. An important factor to consider is that financial forecasting can vary due to unexpected events or changing market conditions, therefore, it needs to be monitored carefully and consider the present situation of the organization. Likewise, the negative variations seen on the different KPIs will also need to be analyzed depending on how the company defined its forecasting processes. 

Paired with this useful knowledge, the example also provides a breakdown of the cost forecast. This is a very useful tool as it can help in planning resources for the coming period as well as spot inefficiencies that could be affecting profitability. For example, we can see that marketing spending was a bit over the forecasted amount, this could either be a negative situation or justified due to a successful strategy. 

Primary KPIs:

• Actual vs forecast expenses 
• Actual vs forecast income 

18. Executive Project Dashboard 

As a project manager, your job is to ensure everything is running smoothly during the project completion process. This can become a difficult task, especially when a project involves a lot of people and departments. To help you in that task, our next example provides the perfect overview of indicators to track the progress of a project in different areas.

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What makes this executive project dashboard template so valuable is the fact that it provides a centralized view of all the necessary information to track the progress of the different tasks. The indicators contained in this template covering key areas such as budgeting, overdue tasks, workload, and upcoming deadlines, enable team members and the PM to stay on top of any bottlenecks as soon as they occur. 

For instance, we can see that there are a couple of tasks that are way overdue, this is something that needs to be looked into as it can delay other tasks that can’t be carried out without the previous ones being completed. By looking at the workload chart, you can see that George has the highest workload of the entire team, coincidentally, he is also the one with the highest overdue time. This could mean that George has way too much work to be done and not enough time, so some decisions need to be made to ensure that he has the help and resources he needs to complete tasks in time. 

Primary KPIs:

• Total Tickets vs Open Tickets
• Projects Delivered on Budget
• Average Handle Time

19. Customer Support KPI Dashboard 

Customer support is considered one of the most important areas for any organization, after all, customers are the ones that can make or break a business. For that reason, ensuring the right resources are being invested into providing the best support is key to success. Likewise, making sure those resources are turning into profits for the company is equally as important. Our next example is a customer service dashboard that covers all costs-related metrics for the department. 

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Naturally, as with any business process, you want to keep costs at a minimum with the highest gain possible. Measuring the costs against revenue can provide you with a clear picture of how much gain you get from your investment and if any adjustments need to be made. 

The average time to solve an issue is probably the KPI that affects the costs the most. The longer it takes to solve, the fewer issues are solved at the end and the higher costs for the company. Needless to say, this also affects your retention rates and brand reputation, therefore, it is fundamental to optimize it. Another scenario in which costs can go up is overstaffing. If there are too many employees for the number of issues, it can generate unnecessary operational costs. 

Primary metrics:

• Service Level
• Support Costs vs Revenue
• Customer Satisfaction

20. HR Diversity Dashboard

Diversity in the workplace has become a mandatory practice in today’s context. Every day, more and more organizations are realizing the value of mixing different cultures and backgrounds to bring innovative ideas that can drive success. That said, diversity still presents a challenge for many businesses. Our last example will help keep executives informed regarding the current situation of the business as well as the success of some implemented measures thanks to efficient HR analytics. 

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When talking about diversity, there is a wide scope to consider as employees can be from different genders, backgrounds, ethnicities, and capabilities. The HR executive dashboard above covers all these areas to provide useful insights that will help HR managers in assessing the situation. The share of management positions for female/diverse employees vs males can show a common trend in the business world, where men occupy most of the high-paying positions. However, we can see that this company has a target to increase management positions for female/diverse employees by up to 20% by 2025. A similar situation happens when looking at the ethnicity breakdown by department, where white people occupy the majority of administration positions. This is something that needs to be looked into to ensure diversity across the board. 

Another very valuable metric contained on this dashboard is the turnover rate by diversity group, as this is the indicator that will show how satisfied employees are with the organization. In this case, we can see that black employees are the ones with the highest voluntary turnover which means something is happening that makes them feel uncomfortable in the workplace. These kinds of valuable conclusions can lead HR executives to develop strategies to tackle the issues and ensure a diverse and secure work environment. 

Primary KPIs:

• Gender Diversity by Role
• Ethnicity Diversity
• Turnover Rate By Group
• Recruitment Breakdown By Ethnicity

The Benefits Of Executive Reporting & Dashboards

To paint a more detailed picture of the power and potential of executive reporting and dashboards, here are the key benefits of using these intuitive online data visualization tools:

• Vision: A report offers enhanced visibility and insight, thus allowing you to understand every key aspect of your business in greater detail, and in turn, allowing you to make more informed decisions.
• Evolution: The ability to visualize your data will empower you to make continual improvements to your business, moving with the landscape around you by measuring and building upon your performance.
• Economy: Rather than spending endless hours logging into your business systems and running reports, executive dashboards will allow you to view and engage with all of the information you need in one digestible space. Time is money, and if you’re saving time (while improving your internal processes), you will ultimately save money, making your empire far more economical as a result.
• Realization: By working with executive report-based KPIs that are most relevant to your business, you’ll be able to refine and realize your business plan by working to accurate, valuable targets, and ensure that you reach them, time after time. There is a number of KPI examples you could choose from, but the important thing to consider is to find the right one.
• Development: The digestible visual insights gained from executive reports will give you the tools to track individual employee performance, helping you to reward top performers and develop those that need additional training, support, or motivation.
• Benchmarking: As dashboards for executives offer a wealth of dynamic visualizations based on very specific KPIs, it’s possible to set frequent benchmarks that will empower senior decision-makers to push organizational boundaries while measuring success in a way that improves engagement, motivation, and interdepartmental performance.
• Communication: By offering access to detailed pockets of information in a way that is engaging and digestible, executive status dashboards improve internal communication across the board by empowering everyone with information that improves the collaborative process while boosting individual performance.
• Speed: The quicker and more efficient a business is, the better it’s likely to perform. Executive dashboard reporting helps executives make top-level decisions quicker and more accurately, which serves to catalyze organizational progress in a number of areas. The intuitive and customizable nature of dashboards for executives offers the unique (and powerful) benefit of speeding up existing processes while enhancing the strategy and decision-making process.
• Evidence: While this may seem like an abstract concept, when it comes to analytics, the more panoramic a snapshot you can access, the better. By being able to dig down deep into a host of invaluable metrics, you’ll be able to back up your decisions with tangible trends, patterns, and visualizations that everyone understands - the kind of evidence that will make your decisions all the more persuasive. This is a notion that we have demonstrated with our examples and executive dashboard templates.

Best Practices In Executive Dashboard Reporting

It should be quite clear that dashboards are used for executive reporting. Additionally, they represent a visual part that reports and summaries need in order to obtain a clear representation of data, generating added value to written words. To reap the rewards of executive reports, it’s important to understand what it takes to create an online dashboard that works for your organization in particular. When it comes to reporting data visually, an executive dashboard is an incredibly effective tool so it’s important to get it right from the outset.

Let’s look at the essential executive dashboard best practices and steps you should consider when creating a compelling executive reporting practice. From understanding your users to data-driven storytelling, you’ll uncover all of the information you need to make your reports and dashboards as successful as possible.

1. Know your audience

The most fundamental aspect of executive reporting is understanding the needs, aims, and goals of your users. Depending on the key aim function of your executive summary dashboard, you will need to feature data visualizations and functionality that will improve performance while providing analytical opportunities that will benefit the evolution of the organization.

By placing yourself in the shoes of your core users, asking people within the organization which data they would like to improve their performance (or make their role easier), and selecting the right key performance indicators, you will lay solid foundations for your executive summary dashboard efforts. This brings us to our next point.

2. Set your key performance indicators (KPIs)

Choosing the KPIs that best reflect your company’s core aims and goals will ensure that your executive reports are both relevant and effective.

For instance, if you’re looking to improve the financial economy of your organization, you might want to tackle the financial reporting and analysis process, and then choose to set up a financial dashboard, drilling down into KPIs based on operating expense ratios and net profit percentages.

3. Use a mix of real-time and past data

During the process of selecting the KPIs, you will use to measure the success or failure of your strategies it is important to consider real-time as well as past performance. On one hand, the real-time analysis will give the different departments the possibility to act on any developments as soon as they occur. For example, the IT department can spot threats or bags in the system and fix them before they can do any damage. The marketing department doesn’t need to wait 30 to 40 days to assess the success of strategies, instead, they can optimize them as they go to ensure maximum success. 

On the other hand, historical data helps you learn from the past to make the future way better. You can understand what went wrong and how to fix it. For example, reducing costs, predicting future demand for inventory management, and more. 

Having a mix of real-time and historical information in your reports will provide you with a complete picture of performance so you can make informed strategic decisions moving forward. 

4. Integrate your existing systems

Concerning the setup of executive dashboard templates, it’s important to integrate all of your current business systems through APIs to ensure the accurate collection, curation, analysis, and real-time value of your data.

In doing so, you’ll ensure you’ve created an executive dashboard design that not only presents the insights and metrics that are most valuable to your organization but also a centralized space that will offer data-driven value throughout the organization.

5. Secure your data

As you’ve seen throughout this post, executive reports contain the most important information for the organization. For that reason, it is fundamental to ensure that the data in them is fully protected, especially considering the rise in cyberattacks that are affecting several industries and companies around the world.

In order to ensure your reports are protected, it is important to set a data governance plan. This will ensure that the roles and responsibilities regarding data manipulation are clearly defined across the organization. For instance, executive dashboards can be password protected when they include sensitive information. Another aspect to consider is where the data is stored as an insecure location can significantly increase the possibility of breaches. If you are relying on cloud storage, then make sure that you are using a cloud BI tool that ensures security protocols such as data encryption, segregation, security patches, and more. 

6. Customize your dashboards

Once the framework of one of your templates is up and running, you’ll be able to tailor it to your preference, editing your dashboard so it returns your specified insights and metrics in a way that is most valuable to your business.

The best executive dashboards adhere to the best possible design practices. To help customize your executive report templates for success, follow our essential guide to 20 dashboard design principles and best practices.

7. Tell a story with your data

As a species, we thrive on storytelling. By creating a strong narrative with your dashboards and visualizations, you’ll be able to deliver essential messages in a way that inspires both internal and external stakeholders, leading to increased success in the process. Look at your dashboard and consider whether each KPI or visualization conveys the message you want to communicate to your end-users or audience. Draft trusted stakeholders to offer valuable feedback, and you will end up with a narrative that yields consistent results.

Creating narratives with your metrics and insights is essentially an extension of the design process. To steer your efforts, here’s a guide to data storytelling for your reading pleasure.

8. Use professional executive dashboard software

To make the most out of your dashboard, professional software is a must. While you can try to use static ways of reporting, you won't have that much power over your data as spreadsheets and presentations will not show real-time information and the lack of interactive elements will finally affect your analysis since you will spend a significant amount of time to export historical data for each dashboard or report you want to create.

By using modern software and tools, real-time data is right at your fingertips, and interactive possibilities are endless. From drilling down into bits and pieces of your charts, to powerful filters that automatically change your visualizations. That way, you will have more time to focus on other critical tasks in your company and gain a great business assistant that will skyrocket your performance.

9. Brief your team on new executive reporting processes

Finally, it’s essential that you are clear and transparent about your executive reporting processes with the entire organization, giving the right people access to the right metrics and holding internal workshops to make sure that everyone is up to speed with the new system.

If everyone knows how to use the core features and functionality of your reports, and they’re fully on board with your updated processes analytics processes, you’ll be able to squeeze every last drop of value from the wealth of business data available at your fingertips.

Now that you know the most prominent benefits of such dashboards, it's time to take a look at industry examples that come from the real world. These templates will inspire your dashboard creation and provide you with a roadmap to start building your own.

10. Give extensive access to the right personnel

To maximize the value of your dashboard for executives, you should ensure that every senior decision-maker in the organization has access to the right insights. In addition to offering appropriate access, you should ensure your executives are trained to use every dashboard feature to their full advantage by providing training workshops. If your executives are fully literate with your new dashboard software and have 24/7 access across devices, they will be able to make better decisions and guide your business toward success.

11. Never stop improving

Whether you’re working with a SaaS executive dashboard, a high-level sales dashboard, or any other data-driven template for that matter, you should commit to periodically examining your efforts to see whether they are returning the best results. Whatever your industry, it’s important to understand that change is constant. By making tweaks to your dashboard that align with the landscape around you, your executive analytics efforts will keep on offering the best possible ROI while pushing your organization forward.

Key Takeaways Executive Dashboards & Reports

We’ve drilled down deep into executive-level dashboards, and one thing is clear: companies that use data analytics are five times more likely to make faster decisions, based on a survey conducted by Bain & Company. Moreover, according to Gartner, most big industry decision-makers believe that big data will accelerate positive change within the coming years. In terms of improving business performance, smart data analytics is key - and our real-life big data examples are tangible proof of that very notion. The time to embrace executive dashboard software is now

During our journey into the world of executive report examples and executive dashboard templates, we’ve considered the practical applications of modern reporting tools, looked at the official definition, and explored the many benefits cutting-edge analytical skills bring to the business table.

As a senior-level executive, you will no doubt be responsible for formulating plans and initiatives that can make or break your business. Of course, such vital decisions come with an enormous amount of pressure. But, with executive-level reports and dashboards, you’ll be able to make choices, create strategies, and communicate with your staff with 100% data-driven confidence - something that will make your working life easier and more successful.

Executive reporting via interactive dashboards provides a true window of vision that not only provides greater real-time results but has the unrivaled power of cementing continual evolution as well as a sustainable level of success in an increasingly competitive digital world.

Perpetual growth and progress are essential to the longevity of any company looking to thrive and survive in this cutthroat business age, and senior-level reporting is the vessel that will secure your success year after year.

Ready to tackle your analytics and test these dynamic executive dashboard tools for yourself? Try our powerful dashboard software for a 14-day trial today - it’s completely free and will open you up to all of the key benefits of digital dashboard reporting. Enjoy!