Business intelligence for SMEs: the first 10 KPIs to track

Business intelligence isn't reserved for large groups. For an SME the goal is simple: know every week, without reworking Excel files, whether the business is profitable, whether cash holds and where the problems are. Here are the ten indicators to start with.

The 10 indicators

Sales and profitability

• Revenue by period, customer and product.
• Gross margin by product and customer: revenue doesn't tell you what actually pays.
• Quote-to-order conversion rate.

Cash

• Customer receivables by age (aged balance) and average payment delay.
• Cash forecast at 30, 60 and 90 days.
• VAT and withholding tax to pay this month, to avoid bad surprises.

Stock and purchasing

• Stock turnover and slow-moving items.
• Stock-outs and items below their reorder level.
• Supplier lead times and reliability.

Production (if you manufacture)

• Yield and scrap rate, with the cost of poor quality.

Where the data comes from

Most of these indicators come straight from your ERP: sales, purchasing, stock, accounting, production. Others come from the CRM, the online store or files. A BI solution connects these sources, cleans and reconciles the data (ETL), then presents it in up-to-date dashboards.

Build a first dashboard

• start with five indicators, not fifty;
• define each indicator in writing (formula, source, frequency) so everyone talks about the same number;
• fix data at the source rather than in the dashboard;
• schedule alerts on important thresholds: overdue receivable, low stock, budget variance;
• review the dashboard every month and remove what nobody looks at.

Who looks at what

• management: margin, cash forecast, overdue receivables;
• sales: open quotes, conversion rate, revenue per customer;
• purchasing and warehouse: stock-outs, slow-moving items, supplier lead times;
• production: yield, scrap, late work orders.

Classic traps

• the same indicator calculated three ways in three files;
• indicators without an owner: nobody acts when they get worse;
• overloaded dashboards that nobody opens;
• flattering numbers that never trigger a decision.

How we can help

The modules of Nexora ERP already include dashboards, custom reports and scheduled Excel and PDF exports, as well as cash forecasts at 30, 60 and 90 days. To combine several sources such as ERP, CRM, SQL databases and files, our business intelligence service builds live dashboards, scheduled reports, automated alerts and forecasts.