WHAT ARE KPI’S? KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS (KPI’S) AND YOUR BUSINESS

Key Performance Indicators are crucial to the health and success of your business. They allow you to focus on the most important areas that are vital for achieving growth, profitability and your overall strategic goals.

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What are Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and Why Are They Important?

KPIs are a dashboard of your business’s health that’s visually communicated using charts and graphs. You only need a few KPIs to measure the most important areas of the business. They are indicators of whether or not you are on target to hit your desired goals. KPIs should be looked at from an organizational level, division/department level, team level, all the way down to an individual level. By looking at them from each of these levels, the KPIs create accountability. By tracking your business’s performance over time, you can also see trends and make necessary adjustments to stay on track towards hitting your goals.

Types of KPIs

What are key performance indicators in business that you’d typically see in a high functioning company?  There are many different types of Key Performance Indicators, but typically, strong businesses build KPIs for each segment of their company.

What are kpi’s for the various business segments?  Some of the most common KPIs include financial, customer service, marketing, operational and HR. Financial KPIs track money generated and spent by a company in order to measure its overall financial performance. Customer service KPIs evaluate the customer experience and levels of customer satisfaction. Marketing KPIs measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, such as click-through rates or conversions. Operational KPIs monitor internal operations and performance, such as inventory turnover or employee productivity. Finally, HR KPIs focus on measuring the performance of talent management initiatives such as recruitment and retention.

What Makes a Good KPI?

A good KPI should be designed to focus on the outcome that you want to measure, instead of just tracking activity. The importance of kpi data is to translate performance information into actionable insights so organizations can make informed decisions.

When deciding what are key performance indicators KPIs for your business, clarity should be the goal. KPIs should be transparent and visible for all stakeholders, providing a clear picture of performance at any given time. When used correctly, KPIs can provide useful insights into how well an organization is achieving its objectives and help measure success.

How to Match Your KPI’s to Your Goals

  1. Ask yourself what “success” looks like
  2. Create context around “success” by learning about the industry benchmarks and positioning.
  3. Identify root causes and levers that can move you closer towards success
  4. Determine who controls the levers
  5. Create goals and accountability
  6. Avoid having too many KPIs

The Basic Business Model

The Basic Business Model is a summarized look at how your business is performing. In order to determine the right KPIs for your business, you’ll first need to learn about the benchmarks and positioning for your industry. You can use the Basic Business Model to benchmark your company versus others in your industry to see where you stack up. From there, you can identity the root causes and levers that can move your closer towards success.

How Do You Measure KPIs?

KPIs can be measured in a variety of ways. Identifying what are KPI’s your company can use to understand its own performance will help you determine the best type of measurement.

Depending on the type of KPI, organizations may choose to measure them through surveys or interviews with customers or employees, data analysis from internal systems or databases, and financial reporting. It is important to ensure that the methods used for data collection are reliable and accurate. Once KPIs have been collected, companies can use a variety of tools to analyze them. These include statistical software, spreadsheets, and even simple visual representation such as graphs and charts. The KPI meaning in business is to make sure that what really matters is consistently measured and tracked in order to effectively understand the performance of an organization.

Examples of KPIs

If you are starting out trying to give your business KPI definition, here are some commonly used KPIs for the primary business segments.

For finances, most businesses routinely track their revenue, margin, and Return on Investment (ROI), the ratio of money earned compared to money invested in a project or initiative.

For Customer Service KPIs, consider measuring On Time Delivery (OTD), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), or Net Promoter Score (NPS), which is customer satisfaction by asking customers how likely they are to recommend a product or service.

For Marketing KPIs, many companies track sales revenue, Cost-Per-Lead, and Click-through Rate (CTR), which calculates the rate of customers who click on an advertisement or link and convert into paying customers.

What KPI’s do you want to track in your business?

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Advantages and Disadvantages of KPIs

KPIs have many advantages, including providing organizations with data-driven insights into performance, allowing for more informed decision-making. Remember what are KPIs strengths?  They put consistency and accountability into important areas of your company’s performance.  They cut through spin and guesswork.  Clear, fair, and reliable KPIs can help motivate employees and provide a sense of direction and focus to teams.

However, there are also some potential drawbacks to using KPIs that should be considered. For starters, KPIs can be costly and time-consuming to develop and measure. They can be misinterpreted or misused if not used correctly, leading to inaccurate results and conclusions. Finally, the KPI business meaning is to focus data, meaning they may not be appropriate for the more qualitative aspects of performance.

How to Set KPIs for Your Business

Good KPIs should include targets that matter to your customers, your investors, and your employees.  The KPI meaning in business is to provide a sense of direction towards keeping those three sets of people fully engaged.  As such, all KPIs should be regularly reviewed and updated in order to ensure they are still relevant as the business changes.  Strong business leaders make KPI review part of their annual business planning process.

Need help determining the right KPI’s for your business?

In today’s information age, it’s easy to find yourself wanting to track everything in your business or see everything as “the most important thing” because you have access to so much data. Make sure though that your KPIs are a direct reflection of your most important targets and only focus on the most impactful areas of the business.

If you are looking for help with establishing the right KPIs for your business and outsourcing your accounting, our trained teams can help you start planning for the future starting on day one. TGG’s reporting focuses on timely, proactive information and key metrics to help guide your decision making to ultimately achieve your personal and professional goals.