Hart IT Blog

Combining KPIs from Australia & New Zealand

Steve Hart — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 23:33:47 GMT

One of our clients operates in both Australia and New Zealand. They had well thought out KPIs, but they only reviewed them once a month. To get their KPIs they had to download CSV files, paste the data into Excel , then manually prepare reports. To complicate things, they had to do this differently for each country since they used different software!

We first improved their process by automating data extraction and calculations. Now, their live dashboard updates in minutes instead of months. Their team KPIs improved significantly in no time. But that’s a story for another article!

Next, despite the two different pieces of software, we were able to get the same KPI out of both. That meant that they could see the overall KPI, across both countries, live.

Their dashboards have changed how their team works. Now, they can see the KPI they are aiming for, so they know if they are winning or losing.

Your business has potential that a live dashboard can unlock. Let’s have a chat today!

New Options for Graphs

Steve Hart — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 23:23:37 GMT

We can now make the text size on graphs larger, perfect for graphs displayed on large screens on your office or warehouse.

What is a data warehouse?

Steve Hart — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 23:08:41 GMT

What is a data warehouse, and when do you need one?

There’s many uses for data warehouses but I’m gonna talk about when we need to use them for dashboards 📊.

Usually it’s when the software you want to connect to has a bad API, which stands for Application Programming Interface, and is a topic for another day!

Sometimes it’s bad because they want to limit how you use it 🤐

Sometimes it’s bad because the software is poorly coded 🤡

Similar to above, sometimes it’s bad because they made poor decisions when they were designing the software and now they’re stuck with it 😩 Xero admit this in their API documentation!

Sometimes it’s bad because they’re cheap skates and don’t want to accommodate other software querying it 😤

Sometimes it’s bad because the software is so old it’s amazing it even has an API 👴

Anyway, when we come across a piece of software like this, a method that we can use to get around it is use a data warehouse 🏢

This is a piece of software that sits in the middle and works with the bad API, coaxing and cajoling it to give up it’s data, and then stores it in another place, usually a SQL database or similar.

Now your data is arranged logically and neatly and we can then make simple and fast 🏎 SQL queries to get the data.

You can also use it for other purposes than a dashboard, for example updating your website 🕸 If we can’t connect to your software then your web designer probably can’t either.

By the way these are the bits of software that we sometimes need to use data warehouses for:

Why have a dashboard?

Steve Hart — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 09:46:25 GMT

It’s either expected, or unexpected, I can’t decide which, but this is one of the most common questions I get asked!

My dashboard partner, Klipfolio, addressed this question in a good post recently. I’ve pulled out the summary below, you can read the whole post here if you’d like.

What’s the difference between Power BI and Klipfolio?

Steve Hart — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 09:45:48 GMT

When using Power BI or Klipfolio as a business dashboard these are biggest differences:

Aligning & engaging your team

Steve Hart — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 08:17:59 GMT

I was recently at a seminar when the topic of aligning and engaging your team came up. One golden nugget of advice was that alignment comes through having shared goals. Those shared goals must be communicated to your team as clearly and simply as possible. The simpler the goal the more alignment you will get.