This comprehensive guide explains software-as-a-service (SaaS) dashboards, including how to build them, why they matter, what data goes on them and best practices for creating them. You’ll also see examples of different types of SaaS dashboards.
What Is a SaaS Dashboard?
A SaaS dashboard is a tool that compiles a software as a service provider’s critical data and analytics in one place. SaaS businesses, like many companies, rely on dashboards for centralized data visualization. For SaaS firms, they help guide integration, development, growth and scale.
Many companies provide a customized dashboard instance for each team, such as sales, marketing, finance, support, customer success and development. Other dashboards provide more granular role-specific visibility, such as what you want your executives to see, or specific to A/B testing or growth. Admin dashboards for SaaS firms have basic metrics on staff functions.
You could also develop spatial analytics dashboards that map out your customer base and the differences in metrics in those regions or countries. Regional or national differences could cause products to underperform. Examples of distinct types of dashboards include:
- SaaS executive
- A/B test
- User engagement
- Customer retention
- Sales
- Marketing
- Finance
- Support services
- User experience
- Growth
- Spatial distribution
However they structure their dashboards, winning SaaS businesses put metrics and KPIs front and center in their daily operations and regular reporting to stakeholders.
Key Takeaways
- Companies have a lot of valuable data. SaaS dashboards provide a way for managers to use this data to make critical business decisions effectively.
- Develop dashboards purposefully to match the needs of your users.
- Integrate your data, develop visualizations and use SaaS dashboards to grow your company.
- Be selective with the types of data you add to a dashboard — focus on actionable KPIs and metrics and align your company focus and strategy.
- Don’t build a SaaS dashboard in a silo. Consult with department subject-matter experts to determine the data each role needs.
Why SaaS Dashboards Are Important
SaaS dashboards focus on essential data that organizations can use to react and thrive. The best dashboards convert a sea of data into actionable insights, allowing the company to navigate in complex, dynamic and unpredictable environments. With these insights, teams can respond quickly and effectively.
Most SaaS companies have more data than they can manage, much of it trapped in complicated spreadsheets. Dashboards help by providing easy-to-read interfaces that show data trends and interactions.
For example, consider a dashboard set up to track customer retention and churn. Because SaaS businesses’ revenue comes over an extended period, customer happiness translates to regular, reliable income. SaaS companies spend money on getting new customers in the door — but keeping them, and maximizing their value, is just as critical and costs less.
A dashboard dedicated to retention and churn would have discrete metrics showing how many customers are new, how much it costs to acquire them, their billing rates, the growth rate and what cash flow and churn look like. In addition, you would want to know at what point customers tend to drop off so you can resolve whatever might cause that. Easy access to this information gives you a handle on the lost accounts and revenue that affect your company’s bottom line.
What Should be in a SaaS Dashboard?
Not every metric showing business as usual will go on the dashboard. Rather, a good SaaS dashboard should target KPIs and metrics that are actionable. Your KPIs reflect your strategy and provide focus. If your business in startup mode and focusing on rapid growth, your SaaS dashboard should be more focused on acquisition costs, sales pipeline and recurring revenue. More mature organizations will highlight customer retention metrics like churn, profitability and net promoter score.
You could also design different dashboards for KPIs vs. metrics. The difference is that KPI dashboards look at your most critical numbers and put goals against them. These KPIs may be more intensive calculations from multiple sources, and you can see how close you are to achieving your objectives. A metrics dashboard gives you additional measures for analysis and perspective. You could turn these metrics into KPIs.
Consider a mix of individual, team and overall company metrics. Whatever visualization tool you choose should be able to integrate data from multiple sources.
Other features of useful dashboards:
- Flexibility and scalability: Look for the ability to manage large and small businesses from a variety of industries, with the flexibility to accommodate unique requirements. That will serve you well as you grow.
- An easy user interface (UI): You don’t want to require IT help to access or customize your dashboards. Ensure the UI is accessible to non-technical users.
- Data preprocessing: With preprocessing, you could integrate data scripts or see what your data has to say before it’s displayed to, where needed, choose more targeted visuals.
- Reporting: All data views should be available to your users. Whether your dashboard offers line lists or graphical representations, users need access to multiple formats.
- Role-based dashboards: Not everyone needs to view the same KPIs. Dashboards tailored to different roles allow each user to view the metrics and KPIs most important to their jobs.
- Customization: It can be valuable to allow users to further customize role- or team-based dashboards for their individual needs and preferences.
- Visualization options: Visualizations make it easy for users to understand and leverage data for decision-making. Dashboards should present data in a wide variety of ways to support the needs of the organization and individual users.
- Security controls: Controls, along with audit trails, ensure that only authorized users can view confidential or sensitive data.
- Integration with business systems: It’s important that key business systems, which typically include ERP and CRM software suites, feed data into your dashboard. Integration ensures dashboards display the most up-to-date and accurate information.
Leading software suites include prebuilt dashboards that can pull real-time information from a database to track progress against KPIs.
Data Sources with Reliable Information
Behind all SaaS applications are databases packed with customer, staff, supplier and partner insights. The most reliable numbers come from primary sources, so aim to parse raw, original data for the truest findings. The same results from multiple primary sources also provides assurances of accuracy and data quality.
Model different scenarios regularly to predict whether various campaigns will work. For example, perhaps right now, your dashboard is telling you that your MRR will decrease in three months, and you should avoid investing. However, with a marketing campaign that achieves a 5% decrease in churn, your MRR may actually improve. Then, review other factors, such as your customer happiness dashboard, to determine where in the process you were losing customers so you can address their concerns and further decrease your churn.
Visualizations elevate SaaS KPI dashboards, helping users picture trends they wouldn’t necessarily recognize in a matrix or spreadsheet. This occurs because the human brain often processes visual information more quickly than text.
Rules for good data visuals:
- Make them compelling and easy to digest. Good visuals allow viewers to understand their purpose, and the data, in seconds.
- Ensure that your visualizations show what they are supposed to show. For example, if you assume you are listing a rate, but it is a raw number, your users will be confused.
- Stick to one or two variables. More than this, and your users might miss the point.
- Use a graphic type that does not overload your viewer: Sometimes 3-D looks fantastic but is unnecessarily confusing. Try a simple graph.
How to Build a SaaS Dashboard
Build SaaS dashboards with your people in mind. How can you give your staff clear, concise insights into their work?
Start by focusing on the data itself.
Step 1: Determine what data you have access to and align it with your current goals.
For example, for your marketing dashboard, you could look at the following:
- Website data: This includes unique website visits, conversions and goal completions. Demo requests and newsletter sign-ups also come from your website data.
- Email: Email data includes email open rates, unsubscribes and bounce rates.
- Web campaigns: Marketing campaign data comes from social media shares, social reach, clickthrough rates and page impressions.
- Spend on marketing: Learn how cost-effective your marketing team is using cost-per-click, cost-per-conversion and return-on-ad-spend metrics.
Step 2: Prep your dashboard.
Organize your data and produce the naming conventions behind your variables. For example, tag your URLs for your marketing campaign with designated UTM codes so you can calculate your metrics with the data coming back in and understand at what part of the lead funnel they influence prospects.
Step 3: Decide your goals and the correlating SaaS KPIs.
Start with your company's strategic goals and pare down to the individual dashboard you are creating. By this point, you should know which KPIs make the most sense to measure and track.
Step 4: Integrate the data.
To make great visuals, you need a unified data stack that is clean and has transformed data from multiple sources. This step is where you work on data integration and transformation.
Step 5: Build your dashboards.
Make the SaaS metrics dashboard UI attractive, clean and straightforward. Focus on people giving quick answers, not because they spent the morning studying your visuals, but because your visuals provide a short story.
SaaS Dashboard Examples
SaaS dashboards offer instant visuals of your most essential measures for different departments and company stages. The seven SaaS dashboards below are examples of what metrics and KPIs you want in each circumstance and why, whether you are building them for a person, team or company.
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SaaS Executive Dashboard
A SaaS executive or CEO dashboard should have high-level, comprehensive and actionable KPIs such as revenue, operational expenses and EBIT.
Opt for graphs that show trends over time. Be sure to show at least one year of past figures, so any seasonality is evident. Also include income statement data, so it is readily available during discussions. For example, design an executive SaaS dashboard with:
- Gross profit margin
- Operating-to-expense ratio
- EBIT margin
- Net profit margin
- Graph of revenue over time, such as the last year by month
- Chart of operational expense over time, such as the previous year by month
- Graph of EBIT over time, such as the last year by month
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SaaS Marketing Dashboard
A SaaS marketing dashboard shows progress on leads, conversions and other KPIs against team goals for the period. In marketing, you want immediate visibility so you can respond quickly to changing lead flows and marketplace shifts.
Therefore, marketing dashboards typically have the following KPIs:
- Marketing qualified leads (MQLs)
- Traffic metrics such as sources, unique visitors, page views per session and bounce rates.
- Conversion rates to show the number of visitors that turn into MQLs.
- Return on investment (such as per campaign)
- Goal completion rate
- Purchase funnel metrics
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SaaS Sales Dashboard
Design your SaaS sales dashboard around your sales strategy. Use metrics and KPIs that show your lead lifecycle so your staff knows exactly what to do to make their numbers.
For example, choose the following metrics for sales:
- Win/loss rate to see if leads are getting stuck somewhere in the funnel.
- Leads by their source to help prioritize sales efforts.
- Sales cycle to monitor how long it takes to close.
- Pipeline to help customize your conversations.
- Sales open activities such as the number of calls, demos and visits per staff member.
- Open opportunities to enable you to track leads.
- Closed opportunities to show the revenue from sales. This metric also shows how well your salesforce is meeting its commission goals.
- Opportunities past due to display the load of each salesperson.
- New and upsell business to show revenue increases.
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Customer Retention Dashboard
A customer retention dashboard is a quick, accessible portal that provides metrics about your users' happiness. Real-time data can help the customer retention team react to churn. Choose metrics that reflect monthly progress and changes.
For example, for a customer retention dashboard, include the following metrics that compare last month to this month:
- Net promoter score (NPS) to reflect how satisfied customers are with your products. Low NPS scores indicate that you could lose subscribers.
- Loyal-customer rates, or metrics that your company defines for who they consider reliable, are worth tracking. For example, your loyal customers could be those who send out recommendations to their friends. Knowing your percent of loyal customers enables you to work on your product and your customer relationships.
- Customer lifetime value (CLV), which places a dollar value on your customers.
- Customer churn over time to show change and whether your customers are happy. It also reflects seasonality.
- Revenue churn over time to show trends that affect your bottom line. For example, you can see if there are issues with pricing if you compare the customer and revenue churn.
- Net retention over time to track how well the department is doing.
- Monthly retention rate (MRR) over time, which you can calculate using all customers or cohorts of customers to see bottlenecks in your service or product.
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SaaS Monthly Retention Rate (MRR) Dashboard
A dashboard specifically for MRR metrics shows where growth is and whether your subscription models work. Show MRR metrics over time, in a graphical format.
There are several metrics to add to this SaaS MRR dashboard to see where your business is improving and where it needs work, including:
- Total MRR to track overall revenue by month.
- New net MRR or new customers coming onboard.
- Expansion MRR, which displays those customers who bought upgrades or more features.
- Churned MRR, reflecting customers lost or customers downgrading.
- MRR net growth or all the other MRR metrics combined for an overall monthly figure.
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SaaS Company KPI Dashboard
Basic SaaS company KPI dashboards target the high-level KPIs that comprise a snapshot of your business and daily metrics. This format should differ from a metrics dashboard and include measures you are watching, but not necessarily goals or targets.
It’s a good practice to share high-level KPIs with the entire business to provide context for decisions and goal-setting. Daily numbers are particularly valuable because staff can spot and address issues immediately. Investors want to see high-level progress, while executives need a comprehensive view.
No matter where your SaaS business is in its growth stage, the following KPIs give you a picture of its health:
- MRR
- Net revenue
- Other revenue
- Fees
- Average revenue per user (ARPU)
- CLV
- User churn
- Annual run rate
- MRR growth rate
- Revenue churn
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Early-stage SaaS Startup Dashboard
An early-stage SaaS business dashboard should focus on metrics needed to assess growth. It should focus your staff on building a product that will be successful in the marketplace while keeping tabs on sales and enabling cash-flow forecasting.
There are five stages to a startup: pre-startup, startup, process improvement, growth and scaling and maturity. Start with the belief that you will eventually hit that fifth stage — scaling and maturity. To get there, include the following metrics on your dashboard:
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Number of users: Even if users are not yet paying, the number shows if your product solves an issue within the marketplace. Divide up this number by cohort:
- Number of users on your free vs. paid plans
- Different countries/regions
- What functions they use
- How they are paying (such as what currency)
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MRR: Customers paying for your product means you are on your way. Showing increases in MRR means your solution is viable. Divide this metric by type:
- Additions: new subscribers, add-ons, upgrades, reactivations
- Subtractions: churned users, downgrades
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ARPA: Showing the average revenue per account enables you to see if, as your market develops, your product is providing increasing value. Added value means you can charge more. Also, as a new company, you may still be developing your pricing strategy. So, for an early-stage business, segment this metric on your dashboard by showing:
- ARPA of new customers vs. total customer base. New ARPAs should be higher than those charged in your earliest days.
- Trendline of ARPA over time, such as annual APRA.
- Any different plans your company has tried.
- Different countries/regions.
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Best Practices for SaaS Dashboards
Best practices for SaaS dashboards start with this one: Consider the distinct roles of your users and how they will use dashboards. For example, users could include senior managers, employees who write your code, analysts and dashboard administrators. All have different needs.
Senior managers often want dashboards that highlight trends, performance against goals and anything out of the ordinary. Regular employees want to drill down on the data that they need to do their jobs.
Analysts are your most intensive users. They will have ad hoc and regular data analysis needs to answer questions that arise from the data. Finally, administrators set up and customize the dashboard, troubleshoot and help generate reports.
Other SaaS dashboard best practices:
- Focus on the metrics and their validity: Be diligent about delivering accurate results. Some calculations are simple to understand but involve complex formulas. Make it easy for your users to extract these and make sure the resulting calculations are correct.
- Combine data effectively: Disparate data sources can be a challenge to combine. If you have two different data sets that you need to merge in a calculation, ensure some data piece overlaps. For example, say you have two data sets: One tells you the pricing plan of each customer, and the other tells you the regions in which they live. Ensure you have customer user IDs you can match in these lists before merging them and finding the average price per region.
- Consider data security and access: Multi-user environments provide a challenge in understanding who needs access to what data — and what constitutes "too much" access. Identify subject-matter experts in each department so you can understand who needs what information for their roles. And talk to IT about best security practices, like limiting queries from each row in your database.
- Provide fast results with pre-aggregation: The more analysis that must happen each time your staff updates data, the slower dashboard performance will be. Therefore, your production databases should not be the source of your dashboard data. Instead, create views in your data warehouse that staff can pull for viewing on their dashboards.
How to Efficiently Track SaaS KPIs With Real-time Dashboards
Real-time dashboards allow users to effectively track timely data and react quickly in a rapidly changing marketplace. You customize the dashboards to meet your needs and help guide your SaaS business through its lifecycle.
SaaS businesses start with ideas. Once you prove your model, you must prepare to scale. Only data, shown with good analysis and tools, can get you there.
Begin tracking details on customer retention, selling costs and revenue in your early days. As you grow, add new KPIs to monitor financial outcomes that specifically focus on relationships derived from accounting data. Scaling involves looking at every aspect of your business in detail and understanding effects on overall performance.
NetSuite’s Software Edition Can Help You Build Powerful SaaS Dashboards
SaaS dashboards provide valuable data to make strategic business decisions. However, dashboards should also be tailored to fit the needs of the user. That’s why you need a tool that will help you build dashboards automatically and make changes on the fly.
Use the tools in NetSuite's Software Edition to build custom SaaS dashboards so you can understand your company's position, challenges and advantages. The solution is also helpful for merging reporting, optimizing recurring revenue, setting up real-time dashboards and automating billing across many revenue streams.
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SaaS Dashboards FAQs
What is a KPI in SaaS?
For a SaaS company, KPIs are used to measure the business’s progress and track how their service is performing for customers, including metrics such as annual recurring revenue, customer lifetime value, and daily active users.
What are SaaS dashboard metrics?
SaaS dashboards show the metrics or KPIs most important to a business, offering a real-time view of the company to track customer satisfaction, growth, revenue, and product usage.
What is the Rule of 40 in SaaS?
The Rule of 40 is a general guideline for SaaS companies that says the business’s profitability and growth margins, which are expressed as percentages, should total more than 40% when added. If they are, then the company is performing well, whether either factor is lower than 40% on its own.