"Finance lends itself to bar charts and pie charts very well, as they are very easy to look at," he explains, "but we also have some line charts for trends and a couple of speedometers for threshold alerts, such as the stock value and bank balance." A dashboard also tracks disasters, and plots them onto a map view, so that ShelterBox can immediately see what has been deployed and where.
The ShelterBox finance team is also using dashboards to make financial reports available to non-finance managers, no matter where they are. "This is so useful. All my management accounts and the latest month's figures are dropped in with a link to a PDF. When our senior management are out in the field, they always have access to the latest management data," says Evans.
So finance is seen as adding real value. "As an organisation we need to make decisions incredibly fast and the dashboards help us to make sure that the basis of these decisions is solid and sound," he adds.
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