Leveraging SuiteAnalytics To Manage Your Business Goals: 4 Portlets To Use In Your Dashboard

As a finance leader in your business - whether a Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Finance Controller or Finance Director - you have the responsibility of keeping track of the financial performance of your business, especially whether it's in line with the goals set by the Managing Director or Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of your business at the start of the year.

And to do that effectively in the fast-paced environment of the modern business landscape, you’d need the right digital solution that can not only process data across your business to produce actionable insights, but also able to present that data in a format that's simple to understand, and glean insights from.  

For that purpose, a cloud ERP software like Oracle NetSuite can be a particularly ideal solution. Designed to consolidate and unify all data being generated across your business, NetSuite uses this data to give you the necessary insights into the financial performance of your business, and compare it to the targets that have been set for your business to hit.  

Trying To Decide If Oracle NetSuite Is The Right Fit For Your Business? Here's Our Comparison Of The True Cloud ERP Software With Its Closest Competitors To Help Inform Your Decision

More importantly, NetSuite comes with a key feature that really supports your goal-setting efforts – SuiteAnalytics, its built-in data analytics suite. Designed to extract and present valuable insights from the data generated by your business, SuiteAnalytics is also easily customisable thanks to its customisable dashboard, which uses portlets – dynamic data display windows – to visualise and present relevant data pertaining to the business goals you’ve set at the start of the yea.

By customising your dashboard and using the right portlets, not only would you be able to monitor and track the progress made towards these goals in real-time, but you can take advantage of its visualisation capabilities to produce easily-digestable charts and graphs, which you can use to illustrate these insights for the consumption of your CEO or MD.

Let’s take a look at four types of portlets you can use in NetSuite SuiteAnalytics, to customise your dashboard for the purpose of helping you track progress towards your business goals

1. KPI Portlets

Using KPI Portlet to track revenue and total bank balance; Source: Oracle NetSuite

You can personalise your dashboard to include different types of portlets which display data relevant to the business goals you’ve set. One type of portlet which will be especially useful for this is the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) portlet, which you can use not just to display metrics that align with your goals, but also drill down into each KPI’s underlying data source.

This means that KPI portlets, in particular, offer you a focused and real-time view of the key metrics that relate most directly to your business goals, making them crucial for assessing the progress made towards achieving them at any point in time.

2. KPI Scorecard Portlets

How KPI Scorecard portlet looks like; Source: Oracle NetSuite

Another SuiteAnalytics dashboard portlet which is especially useful in helping you track the business goals you’ve set is the KPI Scorecard portlet. Including these in your dashboards allows you to view complex comparisons amongst multiple KPIs over various data ranges.

This enhances the depth of your data analysis efforts, and can greatly help you in understanding the nuanced relationships between different KPIs which affect how each of them perform in turn, thus influencing your business’s progress towards the goals you’ve set.

3. Report Snapshot Portlets

Report snapshot portlet - top 5 customers by balance; Source: Oracle NetSuite

SuiteAnalytics also goes a step further, by offering report snapshot portlets that you can add to your dashboard. These give you a quick, at-a-glance look at the important business results that pertain to your business goals, every time you view your dashboard.

With the instant insight this provides, you’ll be better equipped to respond to changing business conditions in real-time, and to pivot your business goals accordingly to account for the impact of these changes on your business’s progress towards these goals.

4. Analytics Portlets (SuiteAnalytics WorkBooks)

Tapping on Analytics portlet to view transaction report; Source: Oracle NetSuite

SuiteAnalytics Workbooks are a highly customisable data analytics tool which NetSuite offers, allowing you to create personalised workbooks that seamlessly integrate datasets, tables, pivot tables and charts. This gives you data visualisations of your key business metrics that provide a comprehensive and holistic view of the progress made towards the business goals you’ve set.

With the Analytics portlet, you can make your Workbook visualisations viewable on your dashboard. You can add up to 10 Analytics portlets in your dashboard, each one of which will display a single visualisation.

SuiteAnalytics Offer The Ideal Solution For Managing Your Business Goals

To monitor and track your business's progress towards achieving the goals set out for it, you'd need a data analytics solution that can not only consolidate and utilise data from all across your business, but also process them into visualisations that enable your leadership to glean the insights and adjust these goals as necessary.

SuiteAnalytics in Oracle NetSuite is one such solution, which provides you with a customisable dashboard you can personalise to display key business metrics that are aligned with your business goals. By selecting the right KPI, KPI Scorecard, Report Snapshot, and Analytics portlets for your dashboard, you can gain valuable insights and track the progress towards your business goals in real-time.

With complete visibility into your business and access to customisable data visualisations, NetSuite SuiteAnalytics empowers you to set achievable goals for your business, monitor the progress towards achieving each of these goals, and adjusting said goals in response to changing business conditions throughout the coming year.

And this is just one way Oracle NetSuite can help busy finance professionals like yourself meet rising expectations in your role. To find out how else the cloud ERP software can help you in your responsibilities, click on the image below to learn more.