Balanced Scorecard Template

About the Balanced Scorecard template

Balanced scorecards help your leadership team communicate organizational performance to senior executives concisely and succinctly. Use this template to ensure consistency and efficiency across all balanced scorecards.

What is the balanced scorecard framework?

A balanced scorecard (BSC) is a strategic planning and management framework. It allows organizations to communicate what they hope to accomplish, prioritize projects and tasks, measure progress toward strategic targets, and align employees’ day-to-day work with their overall strategy. The framework aims to balance strategic progress with financial progress, allowing decision-makers to gain a more robust view of how an organization is performing. The balanced scorecard framework allows organizations to connect strategic planning with daily management.

How to create your own balanced scorecard

Making your own balanced scorecard is easy with Miro’s template, and your team can collaborate on creating it. Miro’s simple whiteboard tool is the perfect canvas to create and share your balanced scorecard (BSC). Get started right away by selecting this Balanced Scorecard template. Then, follow these steps:

1. Determine your company’s most crucial objectives

2. Understand the metrics that describe success and progress toward these goals

3. Break the metrics down across four perspectives: financial, customer, employee, and internal.

4. Assess current performance against objectives

5. Decide on strategic initiatives to lift performance

6. Establish a regular interval for reviewing and updating your balanced scorecard

You can use this information to fill out the template. Once finished,, you can use Miro’s collaboration features to share it with your team and make any necessary adjustments based on their feedback.

Elements of the balanced scorecard framework

A balanced scorecard allows organizations to measure whether management is achieving their goals. BSC transforms the company’s vision and mission into goals that can be measured and evaluated. These measures typically include four categories:

Financial perspective

Most organizations find it useful to measure their progress toward financial goals. Standard measures of financial performance include revenues, return on investment, earnings, and average revenue per paying user.

Customer perspective

If you provide a product or service to customers, it can be helpful to measure customer satisfaction in some form. Some ways to measure customer value performance are net promoter score (NPS) and customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores.

Internal business process performance

The BSC framework is a malleable tool that all teams can use to track their progress. Some of the most important measures of internal business performance are overall productivity rates, ability to meet deadlines on time, and ability to achieve previously set goals.

Employee performance

BSC is a clear, transparent framework for keeping track of your employees’ success and satisfaction. Tracking how your employees are performing will help facilitate learning and growth towards overall team goals. You’ll want to keep track of employee morale and turnover, how knowledgeable employees are, and how reliably they use the company’s best practices.

3 benefits of the balanced scorecard framework

Let’s break down three of the benefits of a balanced scorecard.

1. Improve strategic planning

The BSC is a helpful management system that empowers organizations to build and communicate strategies. The framework is articulated in a series of Strategy Maps, which force managers to think through their employees’ day-to-day and overall strategic objectives. The BSC thereby allows managers to connect daily tasks to key business goals. For example, a company looking to pivot from targeting small-medium businesses to enterprise-level companies might design a strategic plan for making this change, along with key initiatives and performance metrics that measure success in alignment with this goal. The balanced scorecard concept can then be used to communicate this change to the management team and measure progress on a regular basis.

2. Improve strategic communication

The BSC and its associated Strategy Maps are plotted on a single piece of paper, creating a single source of truth for the organization. This allows stakeholders to engage with the strategy better. Without a balanced scorecard framework, each leader must communicate performance on success metrics and progress toward corporate objectives using a management tool specific to their field, such as exporting reports from their CRM, business process management platform, or NPS tool. With a BSC template, overall business growth can be communicated much more succinctly.

3. Improve performance reporting

Companies that use a Balanced Scorecard generally report and communicate performance better than organizations that do not use a structured approach. The BSC results in higher employee performance and satisfaction. By creating meaningful management reports and dashboards for communicating performance, organizations can ensure that their employees are set up for success.

When to use the balanced scorecard framework

Your organization can use the BSC when you want to communicate the goals your team aims to accomplish and measure how you’re progressing toward those goals. The framework helps you align daily work tasks with your overall strategy and set priorities accordingly. A BSC will also help you identify the right key performance indicators (KPIs) that account for all the various perspectives businesses need to keep in mind when setting their overall goals and mission.

How leaders use the balanced scorecard framework to track and achieve performance targets

First, the executive team must agree upon the organization’s overarching objectives. This may start as high up as developing vision statements, though it typically sits at the performance level. For example, your four organizational goals could be to:

1. Reduce fulfillment time by 20% (improving the customer perspective)

2. Grow sales team performance by 35% (improving the financial and growth perspectives)

3. Implement a future wellness program that includes funded counseling sessions for all employees (improving the employee perspective) \

4. Perform routine machine inspections on a daily basis to reduce breakdowns (improving the internal business process perspective)

With these organizational goals in place, the leadership team would then determine the relevant indicators and metrics that demonstrate progress toward these goals and create a balanced scorecard that highlights performance against these metrics. Next, leaders would:

• Design a strategic action plan that includes business process changes and new initiatives that serve to improve performance toward the chosen goals

• Set a cadence for regular review (generally quarterly or monthly)

• Create a new BSC each time period, and assess whether implemented changes have been effective

From there, it's a process of continual improvement to drive long-term, sustainable growth.