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Personalized accounting dashboards without a developer


no developers no problem

In the past, getting your accounting solution to provide you the right metrics may have required intervention from developers.

Thanks to Microsoft’s Power Platform, your dashboard can now be easily personalized to gather any metric you need through power apps built natively on the platform. There’s no need for developers to write code or charge lots of money.

With a multifaceted and user-friendly platform like Microsoft, you can customize your dashboards and slice and dice your data based on what’s most relevant to the success of your business.

Power apps like Gravity Software’s® cloud financials, Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 CRM and more than a thousand other business applications can give you a snapshot of your entire operation without the high costs of development. Add tools like Power BI, and power users can create metrics from almost any source without assistance from developers.

“What you’re trying to do is constantly monitor the temperature of your business,” Belmont University professor Jeff Cornwall recently told American Express. “If you have a good financial dashboard tied to the right numbers, it allows you to observe problems before you start losing money or losing customers. A good dashboard lets you see down the road and predict what’s coming.”

With that in mind, here are some steps to take in customizing your Gravity Software dashboard:

  • Decide on the metrics you’d like to track. Those numbers should directly or indirectly impact the bottom line of your business. What information will most help you make key day-to-day business decisions? Could certain data help you get a leg-up on the competition? What do you most need to know about your customers to grow your business? For example, you may wish to track sales from your top 10 customers, monitor inventory levels for a new product line or check progress on accounts receivable over the past week.

  • For each metric you choose, select the type of dashboard you want — i.e., list, graph, chart or web frame — then use the Advanced Find feature to select relevant field attributes.

  • Choose your own visual design through variables like column numbers, column widths, colors, titles and descriptions.

  • Adjust filters to weed out irrelevant information and display the numbers that will most help you solve problems and improve key business functions.

  • Decide which dashboard elements you wish to share with other employees, which should go to clients and which should be kept proprietary. Gravity allows you to be very specific about how and when that information is shared, and you can adjust those parameters at any time.

  • Enjoy having your most important business information at your fingertips, in real time, every day — without having to dig for it or log in and out of multiple databases.

Think your business is too small to need such customization? Think again. Being able to identify, post and react to your key numbers could be just the edge you need to overtake your competition.

Financial dashboards … may be particularly important for small businesses, which tend to move quickly, make snap decisions and often don’t have the financial stability and heft of large corporations,” advises Phaedra Hise in the American Express article. “Even small-business owners who rely on in-house financial expertise might benefit from checking their financial dashboard daily for their business’s key metrics.”

Need more information about building an accounting dashboard that can give you a competitive edge through real-time insights into your financials and operations? Learn more about how you can apply this exciting technology to your business by scheduling an online demo with Gravity Software today.

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