Zoho Books is changing the face of financial management for businesses altogether, given the comprehensiveness of this platform. This feature, known as Custom Dashboard, enables users to tailor their financial insights according to particular needs in business. For those companies relying on real-time financial information, creating custom dashboards in Zoho Books is indispensable, bringing flexibility, better decision-making, and clarity on key financial metrics.
We are going to go over in this article the Custom Dashboards in Zoho Books: why it is essential and how virtually any business can use this feature to enhance its financial reporting. We will also be your guides as we walk you step by step through setting up a custom dashboard and show you some practical tips that can help make optimal use of it.
What is Zoho Books?
Before we look at dashboards, let's take a very general overview of Zoho Books. Zoho Books is online accounting software for small and medium-sized businesses that helps you maintain accounts productively through invoicing, expense tracking, bank reconciliation, tax compliance, and financial reporting.
It helps manage accounts hassle-free with international standards in accounting. What makes Zoho Books different from other accounting software is the extent of customisation. Customisation helps companies cope with specific accounting needs.
Custom Dashboard in Zoho Books allows customers to choose what information they want to display and how they want to see it, thus enabling businesses to focus on what is important.
The Importance of Custom Dashboards in Zoho Books
A dashboard is a graphical display of key business data. Although Zoho Books offers default dashboards that summarise most of the financial information such as cash flow, expenses, sales, etc., custom dashboards give the user the ability to personalise the view of that data.
For finance professionals and business owners, custom dashboards provide the following benefits:
Data Relevance: Custom Dashboards in Zoho Books allow businesses to focus on the financial data that’s relevant to their specific needs. For instance, a company may track income versus expenses, whereas another company can track both vendor payments and customer receivables.
Real-Time Insights. With a live data source, businesses can make decisions more quickly and make better ones. A custom Zoho Books dashboard pulls real-time data from different areas of your financials-the insights are always up-to-date.
Enhanced Visibility: A Custom Dashboard in Zoho Books consolidates various aspects of your finances into a single interface. This means you won’t have to move between multiple reports or tabs—everything you need is available at a glance.
Efficiency: For business leaders managing multiple projects or clients, having a tailored view of critical data saves time. You can access directly the figures that concern you, instead of going through some boilerplate dashboards or reports.
Better Decision Making: Custom dashboards in Zoho Books are well beyond mere data viewing. They allow you to find trends, cash flow, the profitability of different activities, and much more about your business from a thorough yet summarised visual breakdown of your business's financial health, thereby aiding in strategic decisions
Key Metrics to Track in Your Custom Dashboard
As you set up your custom dashboard in Zoho Books, it will be necessary to track the right metrics that resonate with your business goals and objectives. What will be critical for company A will vary for company B. Here are a few essential financial KPIs that you may want to include in your custom dashboard in Zoho Books:
Cash Flow: Inflows and outflows represent the cash lifeblood of your business. Always keep an eye on the trend of cash inflow or outflow to avoid liquidity problems.
Revenue against Expenses: It is one of the most important metrics for any enterprise. Viewing these figures on your custom dashboard will enable you to track profitability with pinpoint precision and work cost-efficiently.
Accounts Receivable & Payable: If your business extends credit to customers or purchases goods on credit, these metrics provide visibility into what’s owed to and by your business. Timely follow-ups on accounts receivable can significantly improve your cash flow.
Profit Margins: Tracking your gross and net profit margins helps assess the profitability of your business activities. A sharp decline may indicate rising costs or issues with pricing strategies.
Taxes Due: Depending on your industry and location, tracking taxes—such as VAT or sales tax—is crucial for compliance. With custom dashboards, you can ensure you’re staying on top of your tax obligations.
Sales Performance: Total sales or sales by product and by customer could be tracked to know trends, thereby improving the marketing or sales plan.
Levels of Inventory: To most companies that sell physical products, levels of inventory are monitored as a management of their supply chains. Stockouts cannot be allowed to happen.
How to Create a Custom Dashboard in Zoho Books?
A custom dashboard in Zoho Books is simple, though it requires knowing which financial metrics are of the utmost importance to the needs of your business. This is a step-by-step guide on how to create a custom dashboard in Zoho Books.
Step 1: Access the Custom Dashboard Feature
New Dashboard (Image Credit: Zoho)
Access your Zoho Books account to create a customised dashboard. Navigate from the left sidebar to the Dashboards page. You'll find the default dashboard with several financial widgets. On this page, you'll find the "Custom Dashboards" option under it; proceed to begin the process.
Step 2: How to Add Components to a Custom Dashboard in Zoho Books
Zoho Books allows you to add component to your dashboard. You have the option to choose. It can represent data in the form of various types of charts, graphs, or tables.
Adding components (Image Credit: Zoho)
Adding components
- Go to the Dashboard Setup page.
- In the left pane, click Predefined Components.
- Hover over the component you want to add. Click the Create Component icon.
- When you select your component, click on the “Save Changes” button on the top-right corner of the page.
- Time period: You can select as you wish Today, This Month, or This Year.
- Component Name: Give a descriptive name.
- Description: It is what it describes the component for.
Step 3: Personalise Dashboard Layout
You can customise your dashboard layout once you add some widgets you want to use. In Zoho Books, it uses a drag-and-drop interface so you can put your widgets in whatever order you want. You could also resise and reposition widgets so that the most important data gets put out front.
Step 4: Set Permissions
Zoho Books also provides support for role-based access to the custom dashboards. This would be very convenient for companies with more users, as you will control who has the right to view or edit a specific dashboard. For example, senior management might require high-level financial data, while other departments may only need certain widgets associated with their work.
Step 5: Save and Share the Dashboard
Once you have customised your dashboard, click Save. You can also share your custom dashboards with others or share them with other teams within your organisation. Shared dashboards can be especially effective in getting different teams working toward company goals or financial performance.
Note: These screenshots are taken from Zoho Books' help section for knowledge purpose.
Custom Dashboards for Different Business Roles
The most prominent advantage of custom dashboards in Zoho Books is the ability to align them to business roles in an organisation:
For Finance Teams: Custom dashboards will often refer to the focus areas for the finance departments, such as cash flow, accounts payable and receivable, tax compliance, and financial ratios like quick ratio and the current ratio. In this way, the finance teams will be perfectly updated about their liquidity and credit management, which means they will be transparent with the regulatory bodies.
For Sales Teams: Sales-oriented dashboards could track sales performance, conversion rates of leads into sales orders, and revenue by the customer or by-product. Sales managers would better know what to look for in the trends, adapt strategies, and target high-value customers with greater effectiveness.
For Business Owners: The business owner normally requires an overview of financial health using KPIs such as profit margins, cash flow, and revenue versus expenses. This helps in making high-level decisions quickly and effectively.
Best Practices for Using Custom Dashboards
To successfully derive high value from Custom Dashboards in Zoho Books, the following best practices must be considered:
Keep it simple: While the temptation might be to track numerous metrics, more critical KPIs will be necessary. Too many details on your dashboard will create clutter and confusion.
Keep updated regularly: Ensure the dashboards contain the latest data and arrange for periodic automated refreshes when possible to avoid manually refreshing them.
Use visuals: The application of charts and graphs in dashboards is crucial for better comprehension of the data. A good visual dashboard can decipher an otherwise complex financial data set into something much easier to interpret.
Share with your team: Ensure you share dashboards with other relevant teams so that various stakeholders know what the goal is regarding the company's financial performance.
Review Performance: Periodically review the custom dashboard in Zoho Books settings to see whether they continue to support the business objectives.
Conclusion
Custom dashboards in Zoho Books give businesses an extremely powerful tool that will help them realise more critical visibility to the health of a business. Through tailored dashboards that track specific metrics, business owners and financial professionals can make informed decisions, optimise operational efficiency and keep ahead of financial challenges.
If you are a small business owner or a member of a bigger finance group, Zoho Books is the best way to streamline your financial reporting processes. It offers you custom dashboards.
For businesses looking for more control and insight into their financial data, Zoho Books with its custom dashboards is going to play an important role as a tool towards sustainable growth. If you want to understand it more deeply you can use the official Zoho Books' guide for custom dashboard.
If you want to use Zoho Books at its full potential or want to optimise it or maybe want to integrate it with other Zoho applications. Then, you can connect with IT Solutions Solved to achieve your business objectives.