May 27, 2020

Thoughts on Dashboard Design

Lawn care software that has a great dashboard can tremendously help lawn and landscape business owners analyze their numbers and make better business decisions to increase their profits and quality of life.

A dashboard is typically the first page you land on after logging in to a software application.

Well thought-out dashboards deliver top-level insights and actionable metrics quickly, and right in your face. In other words, the information delivered via a dashboard is highly usable and relevant to the minute.

I'm in the final stages of creating the dashboard for Sagenine–a lawn and landscape business management software application.

Designing and developing business management software for field service based businesses requires knowing the target audience intimately.

What are their key business indicators (KPIs)? What metrics do they look at on a daily basis that helps them make better business decisions? Are they missing marketing opportunities? What crews and technicians are the most profitable?

These are all questions business owners have–in addition to accounts receivable.

Software for Lawn Care Professionals

Our 1st target market for Sagenine is the lawn care industry. Lawn maintenance businesses are mainly volume type businesses. In other words, the more efficient they are in cutting grass, the more money they make.

Being efficient in the lawn maintenance industry means:

The amount of time spent on any account doing billable work versus time spent anywhere else. You will make more money, if your crews are efficient.

The KPIs for lawn mowing companies include:

  • Total jobs for the: day / week / month.
  • Total jobs by crew: day / week / month.
  • Time spent at each job.
  • Visibility into each crews route for the day.
  • Revenue earned by crew: day / week / month.
  • Total company revenue earned: day / week / month.
  • List of accounts receivable: paid / outstanding / past due.
  • Scheduling inefficiencies. For example: 24 jobs on Wednesdays, but only 12 jobs on Thursdays.

Non-Billable Activities:

  • Time spent traveling to and from jobs.
  • Time spent going to and from the dump.
  • Time spent for lunches and breaks.
  • Account / Customer surveys.

Crew Analytics:

  • Total billable (on-the-job) working time per crew: day / week / month.
  • Total non-billable working time per crew: day / week / month.
  • Crew overtime alerts.

A well-designed dashboard serves many purposes. Helping owners zero in on poor performing accounts (low margins), crew sizes and inefficiencies.