How can an Organization Assess Performance Against Goals within a Month or Quarter?

Your organization needs a way to get a proactive, real-time, and accurate assessment of how it’s performing against the current month or quarter’s business goals before that time period ends. It would certainly not be accurate to compare month-to-date sales to a goal for the entire month. Some organizations distribute a monthly sales goal evenly across all the days or business days within a month; while this is better than making no adjustment to the goal at all or waiting until the end of the month to get a read on performance, this simple approach doesn’t consider that certain business days may generally have more sales than others and that there may be some sales that come in on the weekend as well; it also doesn’t consider historical momentum within a month or the impact of holidays.

You can robustly see how you’re performing against your goal at any point within the month by using an index model. An index model uses historical sales to estimate the impact of day of week, week of month, and holidays on sales. It ultimately suggests what % of a month’s sales are expected to come in on day 1, 2, 3, etc….This index model can be multiplied by the organization’s goal for a given month to parse that monthly goal out by day. With this, an organization can track month-to-date actual sales against the month-to-date prorated goal to see how it’s tracking on any day within a month, allowing leaders to potentially address performance issues before it’s too late. Value Driven Analytics can build a rigorous index model for your organization to give you a gread read on how your organization is performing against its goal within a month.