3 reasons to build financial dashboards for academic leaders—and what metrics to include

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Central finance leaders are increasingly sharing unit-level dashboards with academic leaders to drive financial data fluency and adoption. Dashboards help academic leaders understand unit financial performance by visualizing KPI trends. Academic leaders use dashboard data to optimize ongoing resource allocation decisions.

Institutions with mature business intelligence (BI) infrastructure have automated dashboard creation in self-service portals. Understandably, self-service reporting is the end-goal that central business and IT teams are working toward. But finance leaders do not need access to sophisticated BI tools and staff to achieve the benefits of academic dashboards. Manual dashboards (i.e., created as PowerPoint presentations or PDFs by central finance) are still effective. This resource shares three reasons leaders should consider building manual dashboards.