Key Dashboards for Middle-Market CFOs

In today’s fast-moving business environment, seasoned business leaders can no longer simply rely on their instincts and ‘gut-feel’ when making key business decisions. Data driven insights delivered to the right people at the right time and in the right manner are playing an ever-increasing role guiding successful organizations.

CFOs of middle market companies are no longer just financial stewards—they are strategic partners and the lynchpin to creating a data driven company culture. Given the increasing demands on their time, growing operational complexity, and rising stakeholder expectations, it’s essential for CFOs to implement real-time, insight-driven dashboards to support both strategic and tactical decisions.

Continue reading to discover the most critical dashboards organizations can implement to help ensure financial visibility, risk management, and business growth.

Financial Performance Dashboard

A financial performance dashboard will allow stakeholders to quickly gauge overall business financial performance. Quickly surfacing key variances and trends supports the monthly close process, board reporting, and scenario planning, among other important financial functions.

This dashboard typically includes:

• Performance vs. Budget: Monitor actual performance against planned targets
  • Department-level variances: Enhance accountability by pushing down overarching company KPIs to each department (where appropriate) to ensure consistent performance expectations.
  • Capital expenditure tracking: Manage investments in long-term assets.
  • Variance explanations and alerts: Flag significant deviations from budget, when they occur, to ensure decision makers have time to take action.

• Gross and Net Margins: Evaluate profitability at different levels to understand the levers driving overall profitability.

• Cash Flow Trends: EBITDA or Free Cash Flow (depending on the company’s industry) commonly serve as a proxy for cash flow generated from core business operations.

• Expense Categories: Highlight cost drivers and savings opportunities.

• Balance Sheet Ratios: Key metrics such as current ratio and debt-to-equity ratio allow real-time monitoring of liquidity and solvency.

• Business Value Drivers: Clarify whether key business decisions will result in accretive value.
  • Understand your organization’s return on invested capital (ROIC) to ensure it exceeds the company’s weighted-average cost of capital (WACC).
  • Analyze your company’s planned investments in facilities, equipment, or businesses. Ensure the ROIC is expected to exceed your WACC.

Understanding ROIC and WACC can be an effective early ‘screen’ to evaluate organizational performance and future growth opportunities.

Cash Flow Dashboard

‘Cash is king’ or so the saying goes. Cash flow dashboards allow a company to track and monitor operating, financing, and investing sources and its use of cash. Real-time visibility into cash flow performance is a critical advantage that can help your organization meet its near-term financial obligations and confirm it has the liquidity to capitalize on growth and investment opportunities.

This dashboard typically includes:

• Operating Cash Flows: Details cash generated and spent on core business activities.

• Investing Cash Flows: Shows cash used to purchase property and equipment, cash spent to acquire businesses, and cash generated from the sale of property and equipment.

• Financing Cash Flows: Identifies cash inflows and outflows related to debt and equity.

• Cash Burn Rate and Runway: Indicates how long a company can operate at its current cash burn rate.

• Cash Conversion Cycle: Measures the time it takes to convert investments in accounts receivable, inventory, and other assets to cash.

Revenue and Gross Margin Dashboard

Businesses need a sound understanding of their revenue stream(s) and underlying profitability. Having a firm grasp on the key drivers of an organization’s profitability often requires the granular analysis of performance metrics that go well beyond simply looking at total revenue and gross margin. Revenue and profitability insights are critical in guiding future business decisions including investments in additional facilities and equipment, technology, and people.

This dashboard typically includes:

• Sales Performance and Profitability: Track sales and corresponding gross margin by product or service type, individual products or services, region, customer segment, salesperson, etc.
• Sales Pipeline: Visualize prospect opportunities and their stages in the sales process to allow reliable forecasting of future revenue.
• Revenue Trends: Analyze revenue growth over different periods to uncover trends such as seasonality, industry trends, etc.

• Bookings vs. Billings: This information helps recurring revenue businesses understand the customers that have executed contracts relative to those that have been invoiced.

• Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)/Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): Recurring revenue businesses rely on ARR and MRR to provide key insights into forecasted revenue and corresponding renewal deadlines.

Operational Efficiency Dashboard

Operational inefficiencies silently erode profit margins. Whether it’s caused by poorly maintained or aging equipment, underutilized human capital, or process bottlenecks. This dashboard highlights cost levers and throughput results to identify and reward positive progress on key operational initiatives and highlight areas where management should take corrective action.

This dashboard ties finance to operations by tracking:

• Cost per Unit or Customer: Visibility into unit economics helps better understand what scaling certain products and services might mean to an organization.

• Utilization Rates: Understand how efficiently your organization is leveraging its facilities, equipment, and employees.

• Delivery Cycle Times and Quality Metrics: Track the time it takes to deliver products and services and their underlying quality to pinpoint operational bottlenecks.

Benchmarking Dashboard

It’s human nature to wonder how we measure up to our peers. In business, it’s a competitive advantage to understand the competition. Gaining real-time insight into how financial and strategic outcomes compare to competitors can uncover strategies for closing the gap with industry peers or learning from their challenges.

This dashboard provides a curated, at-a-glance view of critical metrics such as:

• Revenue Growth Rate: Understand your company’s growth rates relative to industry peers.

• Gross Margin: Benchmark your organization’s margins on its products and services and leverage this market knowledge to determine if you may benefit from lowering prices (and accepting lower gross margins) to gain market share, for example.

• Days Sales Outstanding (DSO)/Days Payable Outstanding (DPO): Understand how quickly you collect accounts receivable (DSO) and pay vendors (DPO) and compare your results with others in your industry. This will help determine if you can reasonably modify the terms of your receivables and stretch payments to vendors to improve cashflow.

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Understand the effectiveness of your sales team and leverage that information to determine the right mix of people and technology for your company.

• Average Customer Duration & Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): Recurring revenue businesses need to know how much revenue is generated from customers over the average duration of the relationship. A shorter average customer duration (relative to the competition) could indicate your products and services are not meeting the needs of customers relative to the competition.

• Rule of 40: Combines revenue growth and profitability results to provide a gauge for growth-stage SaaS businesses to evaluate their cash burn profile—is your organization being an efficient steward of capital relative to its peers?

Portfolio Performance Dashboards

Real-time visibility into the performance of portfolio companies is essential for private capital sponsors—such as private equity and family office investors—to effectively and efficiently manage the success of their investments. Dashboards of this nature typically encompass a variety of the concepts discussed above.

The benefits to those who implement these dashboards are numerous:

• Reduce Manual Data Processes: Automate the timing, formatting, and completeness of the information provided to investors to reduce the amount of work on the portfolio company and free up time for more impactful tasks (such as making decisions based on the results).

• Enable Better Business Decisions: Real-time insights provide investors with the ability to act sooner and understand performance relative to expectations without waiting for monthly or quarterly board meetings.

• Efficiently Monitor Capital Allocation Metrics:
  • Capital Efficiency
  • Capital Structure
  • Capital Deployment
  • Value Creation

Implementation Considerations

To achieve a data driven culture enabled by dashboards, CFOs should ensure:

• Senior executive alignment and buy-in.

• KPIs and metrics should follow a top-down, strategy-oriented hierarchy. The focus should be on alignment with executive-level decision making to ensure what is being measured directly supports the company’s objectives. Design targets and track progress relating to:
  • Business vision and mission
  • Strategic objectives
  • Core focus areas
  • KPIs

• Integration with as many sources of relevant business information as possible, including key systems within your technology environment like:
  • ERP/accounting data
  • CRM data
  • HR/payroll data
  • Operational systems data
  • Relevant third-party data (where available) to support benchmarking and forecasting metrics

• The business intelligence technology being used to visualize data provides robust drill-down capabilities for efficient root cause analysis.

• Each dashboard is well defined:
  • Sources of information are clear.
  • All calculations and KPIs are clearly defined.

• Automation of data flows enable real-time insights and minimize manual processes.

• Role-based access for leadership and department heads (to allow different views of information based on roles within the organization).

Dashboards are no longer nice-to-have capabilities for middle-market companies. When implemented effectively, they become essential tools that empower CFOs to lead with confidence and clarity. By designing a suite of interconnected dashboards aligned with your company’s operating model, CFOs can efficiently drive real-time financial transparency, proactive decision-making, and sustainable growth.