Dashing Looks Want to see your company's latest data? A dashboard puts all the information you need in one clear display.

Lewis Farsedakis wants to know a lot about Blinc Inc., the $5million cosmetics firm he founded in 1999, which has grown morethan 300 percent over the past five years. He wants sales figuresfor the current and previous month and year. He wants to know howmany customer service calls came in and how many are unresolved. Hewants a count of phone orders made and orders filled. He wants toknow website hits, the number of online shopping carts abandonedand more. And he wants to know now, if not sooner.

The 36-year-old Herndon, Virginia, entrepreneur's need toknow was once seriously frustrating. It required as many as a dozenpaper reports. Each report demanded the attention of one or more ofhis 16 employees, and because of the time and trouble it took toprepare the reports, the data was always stale. Then Farsedakisbegan using an online service called NetSuite to generateall the key data he wanted in an easy-to-read, constantly updateddashboard-style readout. "The dashboard enables me to measurethe business on a daily basis," Farsedakis says. "It alsoenables me to catch business problems as they emerge, as opposed tolater."

The dashboard's direct ancestors are the balanced scorecardsintroduced in the early 1990s to help businesses track nonfinancialmeasurements in addition to common accounting measurements, such assales, says Tom Bayer, a Springfield, Illinois, CPA who trainsbusiness leaders in performance measurement. Like the gauges on acar's instrument panel, a business dashboard gives anentrepreneur vital real-time information in a way that makes iteasy to read and react, Bayer says.

If you want your own dashboard, Bayer says you should firstidentify your company's critical drivers. These usually includerevenue and sales as well as marketing data, such as new salesleads. Also look at customer satisfaction, work force productivityand employee satisfaction, focusing on the critical measurementsthat usually alert you to trouble or opportunity. "What arethe magic numbers that influence your business?" Bayerasks.

Critical data can come in any format, but the newest way topresent it is with a software or online web service tool. MiniPeiris, vice president of product management for NetSuite, says theSan Mateo, California, software firm has more than 7,500 users,most of them SMBs. New customers are signing on fast; NetSuiteranked second on the 2005 Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list.

From hundreds of reports, graphs and key performance indicators,NetSuite users select a handful to view on a single screen.Clicking on any number lets you drill down to individualtransactions. "For somebody in a small company, it's ahuge amount of power they didn't have before," saysPeiris.

Getting there takes some effort, however. It only worksperfectly if all the company data you want to track is entered intoNetSuite. That means switching from whatever accounting, contactmanagement and spreadsheet programs you've been using,converting existing data and entering future data into theweb-based application.

That also applies to the other major player in small-businessdashboards-- Peachtree by Sage 2007, which includes NetSuite-likedashboard capabilities in its new version. The rest of the leadingsmall-business accounting software packages, including Intuit'sQuickBooks, have powerful reporting tools, but so far haven'ttried to duplicate the dashboard look and feel.

NetSuite Small Business costs $99 monthly for the company and$49 monthly for each additional user. There are also setup costs:Bayer charges up to $30,000 to set up a company's dashboard, or$5,000 to train entrepreneurs to do it themselves. And adashboard's value is limited to the availability of accurateinformation. "A dashboard is only as good as the data thatgoes into it," Peiris notes.

But Farsedakis isn't complaining. "I never used to getthis information," he says. "Now I get the information inreal time, whenever I want it."