Peter Drucker, famed business consultant and author of dozens of business performance books, is often credited with the philosophy that “if you can’t measure, you can’t improve it.”

Unfortunately, just because you want to measure something doesn’t mean it’s always easy to do. Whether you want to measure your own daily performance or your business’s financials, if you don’t have clean records it’s going to be tough.

Here are 3 key steps to improve your measurement practices:

  1. Understand What You Want
    Most employees, and even managers, start by picking numbers to track rather than beginning their process by understanding what they are trying to measure. The best way to choose what data you want to collect and measure is to create a plan for the data once you have it. Make sure to ask yourself: Will I do anything differently based on the results? If the answer is no, then the data you’re collecting is probably not the right data.

  2. Develop Shared Definitions and Collection Procedures
    One of the most common pitfalls in business reporting is not having a shared understanding of what the data means and the appropriate way to collect it. Create a detailed glossary of all your data definitions and make sure that anyone viewing your reports has access to this glossary. Just as important, make sure to create clear, simple instructions for collecting the data in a consistent and structured format. This will payoff with clean, high-quality data and a shared understanding of what this data signifies for your company.

  3. Collect & Maintain
    Now that you have the proper procedures in place, it’s time to determine who will own reporting for your company and what system they will use. You might start by manually populating data into Excel, although this can quickly become cumbersome and disorganized. To minimize work, leverage software that produces the data for you automatically as part of your existing workflows. For example, title companies can use Qualia’s built-in reporting to always have up-to-date reports readily available.

See a demo to learn how Qualia can automate your reporting.