Financial dashboard reporting can help Tribes utilize data more efficiently

Automating the production of your Tribal information through a dashboard presentation can help facilitate communication of key information to the Tribal council and free up finance employees to conduct more analysis.

At a minimum, the finance function for Tribal governments and their enterprises are tasked with providing financial results to Tribal council, management, program employees, internal committees, and its membership. They also typically oversee that federal grant or contract funds are spent appropriately. Traditionally, this information is compiled from disjointed Excel spreadsheets and accounting system generated reports, which can be time consuming, lead to numerous version control or data integrity issues, and mostly serve the purpose of presenting historical information.

As Tribal council members are appointed to support the future viability of their Tribe and its members, they’re tasked with identifying opportunities for economic development. They should evaluate these decisions on the basis of factors including:

• Viability of alternative funding sources
• Sensitivity analysis for future operating results
• Establishment of baseline reserves or a safety net

Financial dashboard elements

A dashboard is a visual display or presentation mechanism. It doesn’t refer to a particular technology and isn’t solely a software product.

This data visualization allows users to understand complex data in less time than it takes to read a full report. Unlike PowerPoint, which assists in making presentations, the dashboard itself is the presentation. It can be thought of as containing predefined conclusions relevant to its objective, which relieves the reader from performing their own analysis.

Benefits

Functionality benefits of dashboards include the capabilities to:

• Consolidate data from other operational systems that presently don’t communicate with each other
• Save money by reducing the need for internal staff to be creating and monitoring costly reports
• Provide fact-based, real time data — limited in quantity and quality only by your customization — that support timely and well-informed decision making