Last week I told a story about how I took over a team with 173 reports.

I lied a little

The reports were actually dashboards. Tableau dashboards that were interactive, refreshed daily, and built by “Tableau Designers”. They were the thing you dream of when you picture your ideal reporting suite as a finance leader.

Some of the Tableau builders won awards in the Tableau community for reports they built on their free time…

You read that right, ON THEIR FREE TIME they built Tableau dashboards.

But if you’ve been around finance long enough, you know that good-looking doesn’t always equal impactful - in fact, it’s rarely the case.

Which is why I have almost entirely pivoted away from dashboards and into building scorecards for senior leaders instead.

Let’s talk about why you should consider making the same pivot…

Some dashboards are scorecards, but not all scorecards are dashboards…

We’re splitting hairs here a bit, but isn’t that what we’re paid to do??

In my eyes, a dashboard clearly displays information that is needed to analyze and understand what’s happening in a business trend.

In my eyes, a scorecard clearly shows an expectation for a point in time along with the actual performance for that point in time.

Where a dashboard serves up facts and results, a scorecard articulates exactly how you should feel about the result.

At the end of the day, my favorite scorecards tell you if the result is red, yellow, or green. Bonus points if you use the little stoplights in the actual report (🟢🟡🔴)

The reason this matters is that executives are moving 100mph and don’t always understand each metric they are looking at on every report/dashboard/scorecard.

When you clearly articulate “this result is bad” or “this is well-below expectations” or “this is losing us money” or “we’re going to miss our plan”, executives know what to do with that. They don’t even need to open the attachment.

One thing I’ll always hold fast to is that Finance has 2 roles in the business: scorekeeper and coach.

And while many finance professionals want to jump to the coaching (that’s the fun part), we can’t skip the scorekeeping part.

You can’t fix a problem (as a coach) unless the business is aware of the problem (using the scorecard).

Which is why I’m leaning heavily into scorecards recently - especially this time of year.

In my mind, you probably have 60 more days to build a scorecard to measure how you’re doing against plan. After that, people are moving on already (sad, but true).

Here’s my single favorite scorecard I’d encourage you to build today:

Strategic Plan Scorecard

Remember all those cool ideas the business came up with that you built into the plan to achieve higher revenue growth, improved margins, or lower expenses?

Dust off those initiatives in all the emails and excel models you filed away.
Look at what the business committed to by month for each initiative.
Distill each initiative down to a single operational KPI that you can directly measure from that initiative (more leads, lower CAC, etc.)
Measure how the business has done through Jan on that operational KPI.
Convert that operational KPI into revenue or net profit (e.g. each lead is worth $400 revenue, each $1 improvement in CAC is worth $5000, etc.)
Track the monthly and YTD revenue or net profit gap to plan that’s driven by each initiative.
Slap a red/yellow/green on each one…

And you have yourself one of the most valuable scorecards your executives have ever seen.

Have this up and running before Feb results publish.

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