**As a managing director or manager of a service company, it is crucial to be able to view all important key figures about the company and current status information about orders and teams at any time. This is the only way to be able to control the development of a company in a meaningful way.
It is important to have a complete, up-to-date database, from which important information can be aggregated and clearly presented in the form of a dashboard.
With foreknown you ensure that all necessary information such as orders, working hours, projects, tasks and teams are easily maintained, synchronized from Jira if necessary and correlated with each other. Rule-based processes also ensure that the time between recording information (e.g. working hours) and updating key figures (e.g. billing rates) is as short as possible.
Example: A working time recorded in Jira on a task is synchronized directly with foreknown at the moment of saving, saved as working time on the employee and assigned to an order, an order item and an activity type based on defined rules. Thus, all affected KPIs, such as revenue or billing rate, are directly updated at company, order or team level and made visible via the management dashboard.
The Management Dashboard
Foreknown 1.11 introduces the first version of the Management Dashboard. For the time being, it concentrates on the display of company key figures and status information on orders and teams.
Corporate Key Figures
This area of the management dashboard provides key figures for a selected observation period (e.g. year, quarter, month, week) for the following areas:
- Revenue: Provides the monetary equivalent of all billable services and additional services and shows how much of this has already been invoiced.
- ø Hourly Rate: Calculates an average hourly rate based on all hours worked and revenue. Thus, services that cannot be billed have a negative effect on this value.
- Invoicing rate: Shows the percentage of all hours worked that can be invoiced.
- Order rate: Shows what percentage of all hours worked were booked to customer orders and therefore not to internal orders.
These key figures already provide a good basis for evaluating the success of one's own company at a glance.
Note: It is planned to display historical values in the form of charts in addition to the current key figures in the future in order to be able to view the progress of key figures over a selected period of time. Furthermore, planned values will also be included in this analysis in the future.
Orders
In foreknown, orders have a special, central role. They represent the relationship with the customer and the implementation in time and budget contributes significantly to the success of a company. Therefore, the management dashboard displays all current orders with important key figures and a status.
As soon as the volume of an order comes to an end, the status batch provides the necessary attention.
Currently, the progress of an order is identified by the status "Completed" of the individual order items. In the future, it is planned that a regular assessment of the degree of completion by the project managers will lead to a better progress view.
Teams
As a managing director or manager of a service company, you have different aspirations. You want successful, efficient teams that contribute to the success of the company. But in order to achieve this goal in the long term, the satisfaction of all employees must be ensured through a pleasant, healthy working environment.
Therefore, key figures / indicators are needed not only to ensure the economic success (billing and order rate) of the company or the compliance with agreed processes (degree of completeness of time recording), but also to make a high work load on the team (workload, absences) visible.
In the management dashboard, the team key figures can be used to easily check whether the teams are within set planned values. Aspects such as a high level of sickness or too much overtime can also be identified at an early stage, so that you can react in time for the benefit of all employees.
Conclusion
With the new management dashboard, a large number of important key figures are already provided clearly and easily accessible for managing directors and managers. This enables timely coordination with all responsible team and project managers in order to be able to react more quickly to changes.