What is a CEO dashboard?
A CEO dashboard is an interface tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., financial systems, CRM, HR platforms) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., revenue growth, profit margins, employee performance), enabling executives to monitor overall business performance and make informed strategic decisions.
CEO dashboards are typically built using flexible tools like Google Looker Studio, Power BI, Google Sheets, or platform-specific solutions to enable high customization and integration of multiple data sources.
What to include in a CEO dashboard?
An actionable CEO dashboard balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, board members, and stakeholders) and their use cases.
Executive CEO dashboards
Executive dashboards for CEOs and board members show the company's bottom-line impact. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Financial performance analysis: revenue, profit margins, and cash flow analysis.
- Operational efficiency analysis: cost management, productivity metrics, and resource allocation.
- Strategic goal tracking: progress towards strategic initiatives and long-term objectives.
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Managerial CEO dashboards
Managerial dashboards have cross-departmental views with drill-downs to see performance by department, region, team member, and project. They help align teams, define strategies, and include:
- Cross-departmental reporting: overall company, department, or region reporting across functions.
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives.
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Competitive analysis for market positioning and strategy mapping.
- Employee performance and engagement metrics
Operational CEO Dashboards
Operational dashboards for analysts and department managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Financial metrics: budget pacing, expense tracking, revenue forecasts.
- HR metrics: employee turnover, satisfaction, and productivity.
- Sales metrics: pipeline, conversion rates, and customer acquisition costs.
- Operational metrics: process efficiency, quality control, and supply chain performance.
Operational CEO dashboards are highly customized, built in flexible tools like Google Sheets or Looker Studio to enable data cleaning, blending, annotations, and integrating multiple sources.
How to build a CEO dashboard?
To build a CEO dashboard, connect your data sources, choose a template on Looker Studio or Sheets, build your queries by selecting metrics and dimensions, choose charts to visualize your data, customize the dashboard, design and share via link, PDF or email.
Here’s the breakdown:
Connect data sources
Define and connect the data sources to bring to your dashboard. Common sources are financial systems for revenue and expense data, CRM for customer data, HR platforms for employee data, and ERP systems for operational data.
To connect your data sources, go to portermetrics.com, choose the data sources to bring to your dashboard.
You can follow these tutorials on connecting your data:
Choose a template
Choose from dozens of CEO dashboard templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like financial monitoring, operational efficiency, strategic goal tracking, and employee performance.
Learn to copy Looker Studio templates.
While templates are the starting point. Make them specific for your business or organization. Map your specific metrics, especially custom financial metrics, CRM contact data, HR metrics, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "key performance indicators" and "strategic goals".
Depending on your reporting tool—Google Sheets or Google Looker Studio, pick any of the dozens of templates created by our team and customers to solve your CEO reporting use cases, such as financial monitoring, operational efficiency, strategic goal tracking, and employee performance.
Select metrics, dimensions, and charts
Once your dashboard template is downloaded, you may 1)modify it or 2) create a blank page to build it from scratch. Whatever the case, setting up a query always follows these steps:
- Select the data source and the account connected to it
- Choose metrics (e.g. Revenue, expenses, employee turnover, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g. by date, department, region, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your dashboards
Design
To make your CEO dashboards truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your CEO dashboards:
Share
Share your CEO dashboards via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a CEO dashboard?
CEO dashboards should include a mix of financial, operational, strategic, and employee performance metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of the organization towards business goals. They include:
Financial KPIs measure the financial health and performance of the organization:
- Revenue metrics: total revenue, revenue growth, recurring revenue
- Profitability metrics: gross profit, net profit, EBITDA
- Cash flow metrics: operating cash flow, free cash flow
Operational KPIs assess the efficiency and effectiveness of business operations:
- Productivity: output per employee, process efficiency
- Quality: defect rates, customer satisfaction
- Supply chain: inventory turnover, order fulfillment time
Strategic KPIs track progress towards long-term goals and objectives:
- Market share: competitive positioning
- Innovation: R&D investment, new product launches
- Customer: customer acquisition, retention rate
Employee performance KPIs show the impact of human resources on business performance:
- Engagement: employee satisfaction, turnover rate
- Productivity: output per employee, goal achievement
- Development: training hours, skill advancement
To analyze these CEO KPIs, segment them by:
- Department: finance, operations, HR, sales
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Region: domestic, international
- Project: strategic initiatives, operational projects
- Employee: role, tenure, performance level
- Market: industry trends, competitive landscape
