If your business isn’t using an online dashboard, you don’t know what you’re missing. It’s a web service that offers users access to business data like metrics and key performance indicators online. It’ll help you to monitor, analyze, and measure relevant information in critical areas.

But with the range of solutions available today, how do you find the right one? The last thing you should do is simply buy the first one you come across or believe that all online dashboards are alike. So that you can make an informed choice, here are some suggestions of what to look for.

Consider Data Sources

What data sources does your business need? Before signing on the dotted line and choosing an online dashboard, you need to ensure it will support the data sources that are essential for your business. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a solution that creates more issues than it solves. Don’t settle for a solution that requires jumping through hoops to input data. Find one that directly supports your business’ data sources without requiring transfers or modifications.

Consider Data Analysis Tools

It’s also essential to focus on your online dashboard’s data analysis functionalities. When considering various options, look for dashboard filters that allow you to comb over and drill down into the data easily.

You should be able to find what you need at a glance or at least with a few clicks of a mouse. It’s one thing to have access to data, but it’s another thing to easily access this data to conduct analysis and get the insights needed to facilitate good decision-making. Information is, as the saying goes, power. An online dashboard harnesses that power to your advantage.

Consider Data Visualization

You also need to find an online dashboard with data visualization options that fit your needs. Depending on the information you want to present, you’ll want to be able to showcase it with a specific chart, graph, or some other data visualization method. It’s essential that you select an online dashboard that supports the various graphs and charts you require for reporting. The last thing you need is to have a lot of useful data but no clear way to display it for your workers.

Consider User Access Management

You’ll likely want multiple employees to be able to access your online dashboard. And if that’s the case, then you’ll need to consider things like user access management. How easy — or hard — is it to add users to your online dashboard account?

You’ll want to do some research so that you find a solution that makes it easy to add multiple users and control access permissions. It should be just as easy to remove users as needed. If you find a solution that looks promising, contact the vendor and request a trial so that you can try adding and deleting users, sharing reports, assigning user roles, and more.

Consider Report Delivery

You’ll also want to look into report delivery functions since that’s a big part of what businesses want in an online dashboard. If you need to share information with members in a specific department or across the entire company, you need an online dashboard that can accommodate this. Instead of requiring employees to go into the online dashboard to retrieve reports, you can use the solution to automate the process so that relevant parties get the reports they need.

It’s important to know what to look for in the sort of online dashboard that’ll be useful to your business. In addition to researching what makes an online dashboard useful, you’ll want to see examples. For instance, your business’ IT team might want to check out datapine’s 5 professional IT dashboard examples to get some ideas for what a suitable dashboard entails.