4 Reasons Why Dashboards are the Secret Ingredient for Successful Compliance Management

The history of digital dashboards can be traced back to the 1970s with the study of decision support systems and in the late 90s we saw the massive growth of the web.

Digital dashboards as we know began to appear.

However, this was the time before cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service, so many of these dashboards or decision support systems were inevitably built in-house by organisations to consolidate and display data.

As online businesses began to grow it became a necessity to have a dashboard to ensure that the massive amounts of data being collecting from all sides of business could be deciphered and presented in a digestible format.

Today — we’re able to bask in the abundance of ‘out-of-the-box’ providers who are able to cater to every and any demand of your business and data needs. Factor in the low-costs in comparison to the legacy software providers from a decade ago and it would be safe to say that your business should have some sort of dashboard which compliments your goals — be it sales, marketing, compliance, HR or IT.

Dashboards in the Workplace

With SMEs there are a number of departments that provide data and contribute to the overall strategy and goal.

To know how well your business is performing overall, dashboards allow you to capture and report specific data points from each department within the business, ultimately providing a “snapshot” of performance.

However, for your dashboard to be useful to your goals, you need to ensure you understand what data will be that needs to be tracked.

Which leads me into Compliance Dashboards.

Sales, Marketing and HR focused dashboard providers seem to be popping up everywhere. Each one promising to align your performance goals and improve efficiency.

But what about compliance? It’s a huge area for many SMEs across all industries requiring very strict tracking, managing and reporting of data. Not doing so could result in various repercussions — this is obviously something that needs to be avoided.

This leads me to:

4 Benefits of a Compliance Dashboard

No More Spreadsheets

Compliance management requires that staff are all up-to-date with their training and certificates. It also requires that your business is sticking to the industry standards (of course the goal should be to always go above and beyond standards!).

But as staff, locations, customers, products etc increase, so does the amount of data you need to have control and understanding of.

This is when the Spreadsheet clocks-out and a dedicated dashboard is created. Streamlining the entire process of compliance management and ensuring your business is at peak performance, with potential issues being spotted early.

View Compliance — Instantly

The dashboard will provide you with easy access and filtering to help you understand where and why compliance is under-performing or excelling.

You also have the ability to know which individuals need assistance, how far they have progressed with training and what their current status is.

With all of the above you can also send out alerts, notifications and invitations to learners — which again provides real insight into your compliance status with a 360 view.

This would be tricky and much more manual if it were all to be done via a Spreadsheet.

Easy Reporting

Need to find out which location or staff members have expiring courses coming up? Just run a report request in your dashboard.

Data is provided in no time at all and in a digestible format. Making it easy to understand and transfer into presentations or simply share with Head Office or compliance bodies.

The simple fact is that running reports via a digital dashboard is a lot quicker, more efficient and presentable than trying to create charts and paint a picture via a Spreadsheet.

Automatic Record Keeping

Rarely does a Spreadsheet stay up-to-date to the very second as new data gets produced. Sometimes we get lax with our inputting of data or trying to bulk update at regular intervals throughout the week.

Ultimately — All of the above takes up a lot of time, causes unwarranted stress when numbers don’t match and filtering becomes even more difficult thanks to the dispersion of Sheets all over your computer.

Qintil’s Compliance Matrix provides real-time compliance status updates and provides easy to track and monitor record keeping. Time is saved and data is up-to-date so when a request for a data pull is made — it’s a click away.

So there you have it — the secret ingredient to compliance management is the fantastic digital dashboard. Say no to Spreadsheets!