Dashboards and business intelligence to decide

Many SMEs have more data than they use. Revenue, margins, collections, inventory, clients: everything is recorded somewhere, but scattered across the ERP, accounting, the bank and e-commerce. The result is that decisions are made on gut feeling, or by looking at the account balance. Business intelligence serves to turn that scattered data into a few clear pieces of information on which to decide. It is not a big-company topic: it is within reach of any SME. Let’s see how to do it well.

What a dashboard is, and what it is not

A dashboard is a synthetic view of the numbers that matter for your business, up to date and readable at a glance. Its purpose is to support a decision, not to decorate a screen.

The most common mistake is confusing “many charts” with “a good dashboard”. A dashboard with forty indicators does not help you decide: it confuses. A good dashboard answers a few precise questions — How is revenue doing against target? Are collections slowing down? Which products are holding their margin? — and does so without making you hunt for the answer.

KPIs first, tools second

The right question is not “which BI software should I buy”, but “what are the five or six questions I must be able to answer every week to steer the company”. From there the indicators (KPIs) follow. For an SME the most useful are often:

Revenue by period, client, product or channel, against budget.
Margin: selling more is not enough, what counts is what’s left. Margin by product line is often the most revealing figure.
Liquidity and collections: projected cash flow, overdue receivables, average collection times. A profitable company can fail for lack of liquidity.
Inventory: turnover, tied-up stock.
Clients: revenue concentration, acquisition, churn.

A good KPI has three characteristics: it is linked to a decision, it is comparable over time or against a target, and it is fed by reliable data. An indicator that changes no choice is just noise.

The real work is on the data, not the charts

People focus on the visible part — the colourful charts — but the value lies upstream: in the quality and unification of the data. A dashboard built on dirty or incomplete data produces wrong decisions with maximum authority.

The steps that really count:

Connect the sources: ERP, accounting, bank, e-commerce should flow into a single point, ideally via automatic integration rather than manual exports.
Clean and standardize: the same client written three different ways, inconsistent categories, mixed currencies. Until the data speaks the same language, the totals are unreliable.
Define the calculation rules: what exactly counts as “margin” or “active client”. Without shared definitions, everyone reads different numbers.

Automating the data flow is what makes a dashboard sustainable: if every update requires half a day of copy-and-paste, the dashboard will be abandoned within weeks.

Up to date and honest

Two qualities make a dashboard truly used. The first is automatic updating: the numbers must be fresh without manual intervention. The second is honesty: showing what is going wrong as well. A dashboard built to reassure rather than to inform is worse than no dashboard, because it leads to wrong decisions with false confidence.

The mistakes to avoid

Too many indicators: if you look at everything, you look at nothing. Better a few KPIs that matter.
Unconnected data: updating by hand is unsustainable and introduces errors.
Vanity metrics: numbers that inflate the ego (visits, followers) but do not drive decisions.
No linked action: a dashboard that no one uses to decide is a cost, not a tool.
Ignoring data protection: if the BI processes clients’ personal data, the obligations of the new Swiss Data Protection Act (nFADP) apply, including where the data is processed and stored.

How to set it up

Start from a few business questions, identify the KPIs that answer them, connect the sources automatically, take care of data cleaning and build an essential view. It is better to start small — a dashboard on revenue, margin and liquidity that actually works — than an ambitious project that never takes off.

How we work

SIH ONE is an AI-native fiduciary group: we combine technological expertise with a deep knowledge of Swiss corporate, accounting and tax figures. This allows us not only to build dashboards, but to choose the right KPIs and connect them correctly to the accounting and banking data, so that the numbers you look at are reliable and useful for deciding.

Want to turn your data into better decisions? Let’s talk it through together.