Most franchisors are aware of KPIs and management. but going from “idea” to “roll-out” can be too big a chasm for many franchisors to overcome. But in today’s world, which is both highly competitive and data-rich, KPIs in franchising are becoming a must-have to succeed. Metrics can be used in FranchiseBlast to create powerful dashboards and customized reporting with data combined from different vendors, all in one place.  In this article, we cover how to get started tracking KPIs within FranchiseBlast in three phases: planning, implementation, and importing data.


Phase 1: Planning

Too often, people that are only getting started with FranchiseBlast's metric analytics capabilities are so eager to start analyzing data that they jump straight into the process of adding several metrics and importing data for them without first thinking through a solid implementation strategy. They end up wasting more time trying to fix problems with their implementation than if they just invested the time to properly plan their implementation beforehand. In this section, we'll discuss best practices to keep in mind when planning out your implementation.


Assemble a Team

Unless you're part of a one-person company, chances are there are other people at your organization that would benefit from having the ability to analyze the type of metric analytics data that FranchiseBlast can generate. Therefore, we always recommend that you begin by assembling a team representing the various departments at your organization and have each person identify the key metrics that they would like to track and analyze within FranchiseBlast.


Your metrics are as unique as your business. As a result, determining your KPIs can come from the following sources:


  • Industry experts: whether your franchise operates in restaurant, automotive or health, and fitness, you will typically be able to find an effective, numbers-oriented expert in the space. These folks will typically come from a management background, but they can also be found with on an engineering, software or financial career-track. Look for them at your industry conferences or publications.


  • Franchisees: As people familiar with the day-to-day of the operation, franchisees can be a rich source of input into KPIs. Getting them involved also facilitates compliance and alignment down the road. Look to your Franchise Advisory Board as a starting point.


  • Internal team: Your internal team can be a valuable ally when it comes to KPIs. Your Franchise Consultants is a first stop on the road to KPIs, but you may want to check in with Marketing, HR and Training teams as well.


Determine your Metrics


Now that you have assembled a team of champions to think about which KPIs would matter the most for your business, it's time to define a refined list of metrics that are key to the success of the business.  We recommend starting with a list of at most 20 metrics to keep a good focus on important KPIs.



Categories of KPIs are illustrated in the infographic above to guide you in defining a refined list of metrics. Even though KPIs are unique to every business, sometimes seeing samples of KPIs in franchising can spark discussion and build intelligence. 


You can refer to our blog post on how to define KPIs to get some ideas from sample KPIs for a variety of industries.


Consult our Customer Success Team

Our customer success team has helped many systems finding the right KPIs to track in FranchiseBlast and can provide some guidance to refine a good list to start with.  They will also help you have a general idea of the feasibility of tracking each metric according to their source e.g. integration/manual entry/surveys.


We recommend having a consultation with our customer success team as a starting point, once you have assembled a team and have a general idea of which KPIs have the most impact on your success.  


Phase 2: Implementation

Once you have a refined list of the KPIs you would like to analyze in FranchiseBlast, it's time to create those metrics in the application.


As each metric is different in their interpretation, and we have several different ways to define a metric within the application.   For instance, some KPIs might be a daily average e.g. Average Transaction Amount and some others might be summed over a month e.g. Total Transaction Count.  


Build a spreadsheet in Excel/.CSV format with each KPI from your refined list with the following columns filled for each metric:


Required Headers

  • Name: a short name for the KPI
  • Description: a more elaborative description of what the metric represents for your business,  how is it calculated and how it should be reported on.  
  • Category: the category in which the metric falls e.g. sales, expenses
  • Format: the format in which you would like the metric to be reported e.g. percentage, currency, decimal, integer

Optional Headers

  • Lower Is Betterspecify if a lower value is better or not for this metric e.g. lower is better for a metric in the expenses category.
  • Severity:  can be Low, Normal, High, or Critical (defaults to Normal)
  • Formula: some metrics could be calculated as a formula containing other metrics e.g. (Labour Expenses + Office Expenses) / Total Expenses.  You can specify the formula on how to calculate such metrics in this column.


You will find an example of a spreadsheet for restaurants attached at the end of this article for reference.


Our customer success team will help you figure out how each metric should be defined within the application in order for the reports to display the values you're expecting to get from your data by using this spreadsheet reference as a conversation guideline.


Once you are satisfied with the metrics you have defined to be tracked in FranchiseBlast you can pass on the baton to our customer success team to create the metrics in the application for you and move on to phase three.


Phase 3: Importing Data 


Once your metrics have been created within the application, data can start to be imported.  There are several ways for organization owners and administrators to import data for metrics into FranchiseBlast.  


  • Set up an integration with one of the 20+ vendors we support to automatically import metric data on a reoccurring basis.  Learn more about integrations


  • Polls can be set up in the application to automatically poll groups of locations in a business system to collect data for a variety of metrics, on a one-off or reoccurring basis.  Get started with polling today


  • Import Excel/.CSV metric data files - either manually through our customer success team,  or automatically with an FTP server or email integration.  


Learn how to import metric data


Don't hesitate to contact our customer success team at any point while getting started to get some help starting out.