BALANCE SCORECARD
Why Use This Balanced Scorecard Template for Excel?
Our free balanced scorecard template makes it easier to develop your strategic
goals, the key performance indicators to measure them and the projects that will
deliver those goals. It helps by having the balanced scorecard already mapped out
and all that’s required for you is to fill in the blanks. Of course, those blanks are the
hardest part, but at least you have a consistent document that’s pointing you in the
right direction.
Beyond the ease provided by the free balanced scorecard template, the use of a
balanced scorecard is that it integrates the external and internal measures and looks
towards the future, where financial measures report on what occurred in the past or
last quarter recorded. The balanced scorecard also defines and communicates
priorities to managers, employees, investors and even the company’s customers. It’s
the benchmark against which new projects are measured.
The balanced scorecard is also useful across many businesses and industries. It can
be adapted to different market situations, product strategies and other competitive
environments. By customizing the balanced scorecard template to fit a company’s
mission, strategy, technology and culture, the competitive strategy should be clear
and quickly communicated to all those who read it.
Who Is This Balanced Scorecard Template For?
The balanced scorecard is used by professionals in many industries. They can be
found in all types of businesses and industries, but also government and nonprofit
organizations use a balanced scorecard to define and achieve their strategic
objectives. The balanced scorecard is used in all major companies across the globe,
from ExxonMobil and Fannie Mae to the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi and British
Telecommunications Worldwide.
When Should You Use This Balanced Scorecard Template?
A balanced scorecard should be used when a business or organization is planning to
rank its products, projects or services. This planning stage will be followed by using
the balanced scorecard to communicate the targets and goals of the business or
organization and then inform their day-to-day operations.
However, the balanced scorecard isn’t merely a planning tool or a means of
communicating that plan to the business or organization. It can also track and assess
the effectiveness of the plan and monitor how well it performed. The balanced
scorecard has KPIs to report on management’s contribution to performance and
success.
By using the stated goals and objectives as a benchmark, the balanced scorecard can
be used when the business or organization wants to gauge its progress and compare
it with the progress of its competitors. This also helps to demonstrate how
management’s actions contributed to the company’s success and can be used when
evaluating job promotions and salary reviews.
How to Use This Balanced Scorecard Template for Excel
Our free balanced scorecard template will help your company or organization
measure its intellectual capital and financial data to identify successes and failures in
its internal business processes. To use our free balanced scorecard template for
Excel, follow these five steps.
1. Set Strategic Objectives for Your Organization
First, define the strategic objectives for your business or organization. You can start
by taking your mission and vision statements and developing long-term goals from
them. These strategic objectives should be SMART, this is specific, measurable,
achievable, relevant and time-bound.
2. Plan the Initiatives That Your Organization Will Take to Reach Its Strategic
Objectives
At this point, you have a strategic objective and now you must create the steps to
take you where you currently are as an organization or business to where you want
to be. That means developing a comprehensive plan.
3. Establish Key Performance Indicators to Track the Progress and Success Rate of
Strategic Objectives
KPIs ensure you’re progressing as planned and meeting your strategic goals within
the timeline you scheduled. That is, you want to have a quantifiable measure of
performance over time for your specific objectives.
4. Set the Expected KPI Targets
Once you have KPIs, such as budget, costs, time, etc., you’ll want to set the expected
KPI targets. These will be how much of the established KPIs you want to achieve in a
period. This will allow you to track how well you’re meeting the objectives of your
plan and if you’re on track to meet your strategic goals within the timeframe you
established.
5. Group Strategic Objectives Using the Four Balanced Scorecard Perspectives
As mentioned above, there are four balanced scorecard perspectives. Again, those
four perspectives are as follows:
Financial Perspective
Customer Perspective
Business Process Perspective
Learning & Growth Perspective
You’ll probably have various strategic objectives, each of which will align with one of
the four perspectives. Therefore, you’ll need to group each of the strategic
objectives into one of these four strategic planning perspectives.
Balanced Scorecard Example
It can be helpful to better understand a concept by providing an example that
illustrates how it would work in the real world. Let’s do that with a balanced
scorecard example. Let’s look at how Apple Computers used a balanced scorecard.
In their case, the four perspectives were as follows: financial, increased shareholder
value; customer, increased market share and customer satisfaction; internal
processes, increased core competencies and learning and employee attitude.
Apple then used the balanced scorecard to create a plan that enables managers to
understand and address these four perspectives by including shareholder value as a
KPI to quantify the impact of proposed investments for business creation and
development. For customer satisfaction, Apple had to adjust its orientation to being
a customer-driven company by creating surveys to track key market segments.
For core competencies, the company focused on KPIs, such as user-friendly
interfaces, powerful software architecture and effective distribution systems. In
terms of its employee attitude, Apple wants employee commitment and alignment.
They work towards this through a comprehensive employee survey every couple of
years, while randomly selecting employees to participate in a more frequent survey.
This helps Apple understand how its employees understand the company strategy
and if they’re delivering results consistent with that strategy.
Related Templates
If you need help with your balanced scorecard, ProjectManager has dozens of free
project management templates for Excel and Word that can give you a hand. We
have free templates for every stage of a project, including helping you define and
implement your strategic plan. Here are a few to get you started.
Strategic Plan Template
To achieve your strategic goal requires a strategic plan. Our free strategic plan
template for Word covers all the bases, from your vision and mission statement to
business goals and financial projections.
SWOT Template
Before you get to strategic goals, you’ll want to make a SWOT analysis of your
business to evaluate it and where you want to go in the future. Our free SWOT
analysis template for Word helps you to evaluate your strengths, weaknesses,
opportunities and threats.
Operating Budget Template
The balanced scorecard should inform your day-to-day operations, which is where
our free operating budget template for Excel comes in handy. It helps you create a
detailed operating budget for the coming year or quarter, with revenue and
expenses.
How ProjectManager Helps with Strategic Management
Templates will help you get started, but if you want to achieve your strategic goals
they’ll only hinder your progress. That’s because templates are static documents.
They’re not efficient. You’ll be wasting valuable time updating them manually and
they’re terrible for collaborating with your team. Project management software is
going to be more effective in helping you achieve your strategic goals.
ProjectManager is award-winning project management software that allows you to
plan, manage and track your projects in real time. That helps you keep to your
schedule, stay on budget and collect more accurate KPIs.
Allocate Resources and Track Labor Costs
Managing your human and nonhuman resources starts when you plan your schedule
on our powerful Gantt charts. You’ll be able to set the availability of your team
members, including PTO, vacation and global holidays, which makes it easier to
assign them to tasks.
Then you can go to our color-coded workload chart to see who is overallocated and
reallocate their task right from the chart to balance the team’s workload and keep
them working at capacity and productivity. We also have secure timesheets to
streamline payroll and track your team’s progress on their tasks and how much it’s
costing, so you can stay on budget.
