A KPI (key performance indicator) is a number that tells you whether one part of the business is on track. The hard part is rarely calculating it. It is choosing the few that matter, out of hundreds you could track. This lesson shows you how to find them in KPI Atlas in a few minutes.
Open an area
Open KPI Atlas. On the left are all 30 areas of a business, from Sales and Finance to Manufacturing, Healthcare and Cybersecurity, each with the number of KPIs it holds. They stay in one list down the left side, never folded into a menu, and the area you are in stays in view.
Click your area. The middle shows its KPIs as cards, and the address changes to that area, for example /data/kpi-atlas/app/sales/, so you can bookmark it or send it to a colleague.
Start from the starter dashboard
At the top of every area is the Starter dashboard: the three to seven KPIs most teams in that area track, each already drawn in its best chart with an example value. For Sales that is revenue, growth, win rate, deal size, cycle length and quota attainment.
If you are not sure where to begin, begin here. These are the KPIs your manager, your board and most reports in your industry expect to see. Lesson 6 turns them into a real dashboard page.
Read the cards
Each card tells you a lot before you open it:
| On the card | What it means |
|---|---|
| Top line | How often teams usually track it: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly |
| Name and two lines | What the KPI is |
| Direction mark | A chevron up: higher is better. A chevron down: lower is better. A dash: keep it in a range |
| Unit | Percent, money, days, a ratio and so on |
| Small icons | Its best charts, the first in the category colour |
Search by name
Press / anywhere and type. Search looks through all 455 KPIs, whatever area you are in, and knows their other names and short forms: churn, OEE, DSO, ROAS, eNPS, RevPAR all find their KPI first. Several words work too, like time to hire.
Press Enter to open the first result, or the arrow keys to move through the list.
Narrow it down
Above the cards are filters: Higher is better or Lower is better, how often it is tracked (Track), and which chart shows it (Chart). They combine with the area and the search. Clear filters brings everything back.
The next lesson opens a KPI and reads everything the atlas knows about it.