Ask HN: What metrics does your business need?

There's been a lot of discussion on business dashboards here and elsewhere recently particularly since software house Panic blogged about their internal dashboard [1]. These dashboards tie together up-to-the-minute information on the various aspects of your business such as outstanding support requests and emails, project status, sales/revenue metrics, web analytics, infrastructure status etc and put them all in one place for easy consumption. I know that BCC Patrick (patio11) is a big fan (so much so that he built his own [2]), others too have mentioned how useful they are.

I thought it might be useful to offer a hosted dashboards for businesses so I began working on one that would consume data from some common APIs that many businesses - particularly startups - will be plugged into. The service will launch into a mvp beta in one month with about a dozen APIs including Google Analytics, Basecamp, Commission Junction, Pingdom, ChartBeat & MailChimp [3]. One thing it's not launching with is a custom data upload facility but I've got a pretty good idea of how that's going to look and it'll be added shortly after.

The question I'm asking today - what are the most important metrics to your business and how do you currently track them?

[1] http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/03/the-panic-status-board/ and discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1177227

[2] http://www.bingocardcreator.com/articles/dashboard-on-a-shoestring.htm and discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1189203

[3] http://www.geckoboard.com (you can register your name to be part of the beta)