What is the difference between a Scorecard and a Dashboard?

Written by Andreea Vecerdea on October 21, 2013. Posted in Articles, Operational performance

In the world of Performance Management, these two terms are often confused and sometimes used interchangeably. Although they both aggregate data across business units and give the reader the opportunity to monitor performance, there are important distinctions to be noted between Scorecards and Dashboards.

A scorecard is a performance management tool that has the role of measuring a company’s performance against strategically established objectives. The main benefit of the Scorecard is that it translates organizational strategy to operational processes. Best practices in the field recommend the Balanced Scorecard approach, an integrated framework for describing strategy through the use of linked KPIs in four, balanced perspectives – Financial, Customer, Internal Processes and Learning & Growth. Each perspective contains several established objectives which are ideally monitored by 2 KPIs. Furthermore, a Scorecard includes relevant fields for each KPI such as: the target, the trend, the standard reporting frequency, previous and current results, “traffic lights” (red, yellow or green symbols that provide an instant visualization of KPI results) and a section for comments (which provides context or a brief explanation about what has influenced results).

On the other hand, Dashboards are a collection of graphs, charts, gauges or other visual representations that are used to monitor the levels of the selected KPIs. The Dashboard is used for monitoring operational activities and is not necessarily directly linked with the strategic directions of a company. Moreover, the dashboard usually provides instant review of results and is constantly updated, while a scorecard is used for monitoring KPIs which are regularly reported on a monthly or quarterly basis. Finally, a dashboard usually differs from a scorecard by the number of KPIs that are monitored on it. It is recommended that the scorecard contains around 25 KPIs while the dashboard is recommended to contain up to 10 KPIs.

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