Treasury Contrarian View: Treasury Dashboards — Are We Tracking the Wrong Metrics?

Treasury Contrarian View: Treasury Dashboards — Are We Tracking the Wrong Metrics?

Dashboards have become a staple in corporate treasury—colorful visuals, real-time updates, and dozens of KPIs all packed into a single screen. But here’s the question: Are treasury dashboards helping us make better decisions, or are they just digital wallpaper? Are we tracking the right things, or are we so focused on reporting that we’re missing the big picture?

The Case for Dashboard Overload

  1. Too Much Data, Too Little Insight
    • Many dashboards prioritize quantity over quality. Just because something can be measured doesn’t mean it should be. Treasurers may find themselves overwhelmed by data points that don’t drive action.
  2. Vanity Metrics vs. Value Metrics
    • Are we measuring what matters? Metrics like number of bank accounts or payments processed may look good, but do they truly reflect treasury performance or risk exposure?
  3. Misaligned KPIs
    • Dashboards often reflect the priorities of the software provider or IT department rather than the strategic goals of the treasury function.
  4. Static Reporting in a Dynamic World

Dashboards are often backward-looking, summarizing what’s already happened instead of predicting or prescribing what should happen next.

The Case for Strategic Dashboards

  1. Real-Time Visibility
    • Dashboards can be powerful when they provide timely visibility into cash positions, FX exposures, or counterparty risk, enabling faster decision-making.
  2. Risk and Liquidity Monitoring
    • A well-designed dashboard can help treasury monitor critical risks—like interest rate sensitivities or covenant compliance—in a digestible format.
  3. Communication Tool
    • Dashboards can support storytelling, helping treasury teams clearly explain cash positions, liquidity strategies, or performance KPIs to CFOs and boards.
  4. Benchmarking and Goal Tracking

They can help track progress against internal benchmarks or market standards, driving performance and accountability.

Rethinking Treasury Dashboards

Rather than packing dashboards with every possible metric, treasurers should ask:

  • What decisions are we trying to drive with this data?
  • Which metrics reflect business risk and opportunity, not just activity?
  • Can we streamline dashboards to focus on predictive and prescriptive analytics, not just historic data?

Let’s Discuss

  • Are your treasury dashboards driving meaningful action, or just reporting for the sake of reporting?
  • What are the top 3 metrics you believe every treasury dashboard should include?
  • How do you ensure your dashboards stay aligned with treasury’s strategic goals?

We’ll be sharing examples and expert opinions from board members and treasury tech partners—join the conversation and let us know what metrics matter most to you.

COMMENTS

Sebastian Muller-Bosse, Treasury Masterminds board member, comments:

Everyone knows what a furniture maker or a potter creates, but what about a treasurer? What does a treasurer work with, and what is their masterpiece at the end of the day? For me, it’s the report that transforms financial data into actionable information, ultimately leading to wisdom for financial decision-making.

Too often, when creating reports, the question is “What do we want to report?” or “Which information should we show?” However, it’s more effective to start with “Why?” If I understand the purpose of the report, I can build it more efficiently instead of just displaying the requested information. Often, these details are presented in plain tables because they’re just numbers. The second crucial question that brings clarity is “How do I present the data so that the information reaches the recipient quickly and efficiently?” This requires exploring various visualization options. Is a bar chart or a pie chart better? Could it be a waterfall diagram or even a treemap? Have you ever heard of Sankey diagrams? Can colors and sizes be used effectively? Which tool should I use to present it—Excel, PDF, PowerPoint, Tableau, or Power BI? Does my recipient have specific preferences? Answering these questions will help you build a good dashboard that presents information in a targeted manner and might even tell a data story.

Because if the treasurer’s work at the end of the day is a report, we should all know our tools to craft a masterpiece that is admired.

Alexander Ilkun, Treasury Masterminds board member, comments:

In my worldview, dashboards are an instrument that is integral to an effective and efficient Treasury team – on both operational as well as strategic level.

Why does a visualization tool beat analyzing raw data in Excel?

People are quite bad at consuming information in tables – carefully crafted visuals help tremendously in understanding what the data tells us. Instead of your team member taking an Excel spreadsheet on a regular basis and putting it into a pivot table or chart to glimpse insights it saves a quite a bit of time and effort when the information can be accessed effortlessly in a visualization.

Then there is also an argument of missing the datapoints. It will be hard to find a person who was looking at the pivot trying to make sense of the data only to realize that some of the datapoints got filtered out or were not displayed.

Further, once the data is visualized, it spurs thinking about how to get inputs automatically – in my experience, a vast portion of input retrieval can be automated and data can be transformed consistently and systematically before it is visualized in exact same way as it has always been.

The final argument I will make is in the realm of business continuity – it is much easier to train someone new how to read a properly developed dashboard (with built-in tooltips and manual, if needed) than to transition an Excel model, where you have to worry about the skill level of the individual taking over the data model as well as its integrity going forward (since, lets admit) even experts can accidentally break a model).

Dashboards can also serve as an excellent communication tool. By displaying information to Treasury team members and other stakeholders, it is possible to allow them to self-serve in order to find answers to many questions without relying on someone reading the email, manually checking the data, and then responding.

  • What’s our exposure to this bank that hit the news this morning?
  • How much cash do we have in this country?
  • What are our cash repatriation plans for the year?
  • Did we get all the statements that were supposed to arrive by this time of the day?

These are just a few questions that come to mind that could be effectively answered 24/7 by dashboards that are tailored for that specific purpose.

As you can sense from the direction, I’m a big proponent of having various reports tailored for a specific need, which means there are various functional reports, from which select information may be combined into a smaller number of strategic dashboards or even a single one (although avoid overcrowding your visualization).

It will raise an inevitable question – how much time is spent gathering data for these? Is it really worth it?

The answer is that in the current technological era, a lot (if not all) data retrieval can be automated by API, RPA, or another kind of interface. When you take out the time investment to gather inputs, you are only left with the benefit that report gives you. Therefore, you can afford to run those reports as often as you need, getting close to near real-time information, without incurring additional cost (the costs of many tools are often fixed).

What is even more – once you have the inputs and the reports automated, you can start thinking about combining the data from various reports to initiate trigger-based action or automate business workflows, which raises your game to the whole next level.

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