What Does This Page Cover?
Learn about dashboards and their types, how they help in informed decision-making, and why it is essential to have dashboards in a procurement process application.
Overview
Dashboard is a way of displaying a visual overview of data in one place from different sources. In the SaaS industry, dashboards are widely used as an information management tool that tracks, gathers, and displays business data in an interactive and customizable visualizations. The graphical interface of dashboards provides users with at-a-glance visibility of key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to their business process, which benefits the organization with improved decision-making, and insights on up-to-date performance, saving time and resources.
Dashboards in Procurement by Zoho Creator
One of the key benefits of a dashboard is that they enable you to maintain control of your data narrative, especially when various stake holders are involved in the process.
Within our procurement solution, we have three different role-specific dashboards exclusive to procurement, finance, and suppliers. Each team will get to access dashboards specific to them, and the data will be populated when the underlying data is available and ready to use.
Procurement Dashboard
This is specific to the procurement team to track their procurement requests and purchase orders at every stage of the process and to access the expense information. The team can also view and understand up-to-date data about active and inactive projects, suppliers, and products.
Finance Dashboard
Specific to the finance team, this dashboard helps them to access number of projects and to track every project budget and spend individually. From here, the team can also manage Procurement Requests (PRs) and Purchase Orders (POs) that require finance approvals and to keep track of payment completion requests. The dashboards also enables them to access the monthly expenses, which act as an integral part of financial decisions.
Supplier Dashboard
This dashboard is specific to supplier and vendors to track the number of quotations and orders they need to action further. Access monthly revenue data and add and manage products to maintain an updated inventory.
Prerequisites
The dashboard isn't contingent on any specific prerequisite. The data simply gets populated when the underlying data is available in the application.
Use Cases
Procurer
Procurement team uses the dashboard to:
- Track PRs and POs
- To have control on Expenses
- To access the number of active and inactive projects, suppliers, and product
Example: Procurement dashboards show a clear graphical representation of PRs in each status (Pending, Ongoing, Moved to purchase, Completed, and Total), along with the POs to action. This intuitive page helps the team to find out the required information at a glance and speed up the process.
Finance
For finance team, the dashboard helps to:
- Access the total number of projects and track each project's budget and spending
- Keep track of PRs and POs for approval and to process payment requests
- Access the monthly expense chart for important decisions
Example: The dashboard gives a quick glance of the projects and their corresponding total budget and amount spent so far. This clear view of data helps the team in regulating the overall financial decisions.
Supplier
Suppliers or vendors use their dashboards mainly to:
- Track quotations and orders to action
- Access their monthly revenue data
- Add and manage the product list to maintain updated inventory.
Example: Suppliers are mainly involved in providing quotations to the procurement requests and the at-a-glance view in the dashboard clearly depicts the total number of quotations along with the quotations given and selected, which helps them speed up the process of their call-for-action.
Points to Note
At present, our dashboards are configured to automatically populate data as soon as the underlying data is available. Please note that user customization of these dashboards is not available at this time. However, we're actively working on a feature that will allow super admins to tailor dashboards for each role.
In the meantime, if the user has a specific customization request in the dashboards, for example to add or modify a particular chart or report or requires any other statistics from a different perspective, they can contact us. If any requests are feasible, they can be included to the current dashboards.
Links to each dashboards will be added later when they are available.